Surgery and Anaesthesia: Revolutions in Practice

Abstract

The discovery of anaesthesia in the 1840s was a defining moment in the history of surgery, though its introduction and establishment as a routine practice remain curiously under-explored by historians. The controversies that accompanied its introduction give insights into the social and cultural history of nineteenth-century attitudes to suffering, surgery, and risk. The broad divergence in patterns of anaesthetic use that persisted through to the mid-twentieth century and the different trajectories of specialist anaesthesia across the Western world speak to cultural differences around the calculation of risk and the making of surgical identities. In the twenty-first century anaesthesia continues to raise questions about the nature of pain and indeed, of life and death: its mechanism remains elusive; the process continues to be risky; and patients remain fearful of anaesthesia. Yet it is now impossible to imagine a world without it.