The Discovery of Surgical Anesthesia

Abstract

The suppression of pain during surgical interventions has been a major achievement for humankind. Chronologically, in 1842, William E. Clarke, a chemist in Rochester (NY), provided Elijah Pope with ether for the purposes of tooth extraction. In 1844, in Boston, G.Q. Colton and the dentist Horace Wells used nitrous oxide as an anesthetic for tooth extraction. On the 16th of October, 1846, the American dentist William T.G. Morton became a pioneer within the medical community with respect to anesthesia by inhalation when he used ether as an anesthetic at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1847, the Scot James Young Simpson began to use chloroform as an anesthetic for obstetrics in Edinburgh. These events gave rise to several disputes among their users (who are not very well-known today), who strove to claim that they had been the discoverers of surgical anesthesia, with a view to obtaining a series of patents and state sinecures. This article attempts to clarify certain discrepancies about the authorship of surgical anesthesia. The evidence suggests that surgical anesthesia first began to be applied in the field of dentistry.