Pain is the most basic feeling of the human body, and it is also the feeling that everyone experiences the most in their life.
When ** or internal organs are stimulated, the nerves produce pain signals, which are quickly transmitted to the brain, and the brain is analyzed, and the human body turns on the self-protection mechanism, resulting in muscle contraction, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, shortness of breath, sweating, and in severe cases, leading to shock or death.
Pain is a problem that must be addressed in surgery.
Without a surgical procedure prior to anesthesia, doctors used **, bloodletting, drunkenness, or stick tapping to relieve pain, but these patients would still wake up screaming or die from severe pain.
In 1772, the British missionary Joseph. Priestley discovers nitrous oxide (laughing gas). It is a colorless gas with a little sweetness, which can make people feel happy, lose the feeling of pain, and can't help laughing, so it is called "laughing gas". At the time of its discovery, laughing gas was used for entertainment and later in medical anesthesia.
On January 20, 1845, American dentist Wells publicly demonstrated his technique of anaesthesia for laughing gas at Harvard University's Massachusetts General Hospital, but the patient did not inhale laughing gas correctly, resulting in the failure of this public demonstration. This is related to the fact that laughing gas itself is not very anesthetic.
Another narcotic substance, ether, was synthesized as early as 1540 by the German chemist Valentin Ross. At that time, he mixed sulfuric acid and ethanol and heated it to obtain a substance that he called "sweet oil". The English chemist Robert Boyle rediscovered the substance in 1650 and gave it the more accurate name ether.
In 1818, the British physicist and chemist Michael Faraday made further research on ether and found that it can also produce pleasure after inhalation, like nitrous oxide (commonly known as laughing gas), if inhaled in sufficient amounts, it can make people become numb and lose their sense of pain, but this discovery did not attract the attention of the medical community at that time.
On March 30, 1842, Crawford Williamson Lang, an American country doctor, successfully performed a cyst removal on the neck of a local farmer, Venable, using ether analgesics. This is the world's earliest recorded use of ether as an anesthetic.
On October 16, 1846, Dr. William Morton, a Boston dentist, publicly demonstrated his experiments at Harvard University's Massachusetts General Hospital. In front of the crowd, Dr. Morton walked onto the operating table with an ether nebulizer in his hand, and he carefully opened the valve and delivered the ether nebulizer to the patient's mouth. After a few minutes, the patient fell into a coma. This is the first public ** operation in history, which has been recorded in history, and October 16 of each year has also become "Ether Day".
1847 Simpson used chloroform for the first time to relieve labor analgesia, and it was successful. Since then, there have been many inhalations***.
At the same time, in view of the problems in the process of surgical anesthesia, it has also developed from simple analgesia to a more comprehensive treatment during anesthesia and before and after anesthesia, and accumulated rich clinical experience in the 30s and 40s of the 20th century, and gradually formed clinical anesthesiology.
Under the escort of anesthesiology, many difficult and critical surgeries have been performed, thus saving the lives of countless patients.
In the 50s of the 20th century, halothane, methoxyflurane, enflurane, isoflurane, sevoflurane, etc. appeared one after another, coupled with the emergence of sodium oxybate, aminokelate, etomidate, anteone, propofol and other intravenous drugs greatly enriched the types of general anesthesia drugs, and a large number of full-time anesthesia professionals appeared, marking the official entry of anesthesiology into the stage of modern anesthesia.
With the development of modern medicine and the continuous updating of new theories, new technologies and new equipment, the scope and field of work of anesthesiologists have been further expanded.
The concept of anesthesiology has changed from ensuring intraoperative safety to focusing on postoperative.
In the development history of more than 170 years, anesthesiology has developed from the initial clinical anesthesia to a clinical specialty integrating pain diagnosis and treatment, comfortable medical care, critical care, and emergency resuscitation.
This is the history of anesthesiology in the West.
In the history of anesthesia in our country, the most famous figure belongs to Hua Tuo in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, who invented hemp boiling powder, but now it has been lost.
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