A short history of anaesthesia: from unspeakable agony to unlocking consciousness
- Written by David Liley, Professor, Centre for Human Psychopharmacology, Swinburne University of Technology
General anaesthesia has come a long way since its first public demonstration in the 19th century, depicted here.Wellcome Library, London/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
We expect to feel no pain during surgery or at least to have no memory of the procedure. But it wasn’t always so.
Until the discovery of general anaesthesia in the middle of the 19th...
