Nitrous Oxide, Ether, and Chloroform Anesthesia in the 19th Century

I think it’s fair to say that medical science and medical treatment made very little progress for many centuries in the Common Era.  In fact, patients very often saw the appearance of the physician at their bedside as an occasion for outright fear and despair; a certain sign that the end was near.  Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, three stunning advances were made, in antisepsis and anesthesia (in the 19th century) and antibiotics (in the 20th).  Patients were not slow to recognize the tremendous benefit of these advances.  One needs only read the personal reports on surgery without anesthesia to be sure of that.

However, of these three, the early development of anesthesia was particularly unpromising.  As is caricatured in the image, anesthetics had their beginning in private and then public entertainment.

In the 18th century, scientist Joseph Priestly and others discovered biologically active gases, oxygen and nitrous oxide among them, and so the existence of such things was well known.  The anesthetic and entertainment effects of nitrous oxide, however, were not known until 1795 when scientist Humphrey Davy (pictured with the bellows in the image) tried inhaling it.  Its effects struck everyone as a really good party stunt and public entertainments such as that depicted on the right quickly followed.

Still, it was not considered for medical use until an American dentist, Horace Wells, had it administered to himself for extraction of a molar.  This happened to work well enough, but when he and a colleague, the dentist and Harvard medical student William T. Morton tried to demonstrate its use for the extraction of a neck mass from a large, bull-necked individual, the demonstration failed for technical reasons and Wells was disgraced.  He later became addicted to the anesthetic gas chloroform and committed suicide.  Morton went on to work successfully with ether anesthesia, but fell into disgrace when he tried to profit personally from the use of the agent.

James Simpson, a professor in Edinburgh, was working with chemicals for anesthesia with some colleagues when, according to a possibly apocryphal report, one of them tipped over a bottle of chloroform.  Simpson’s wife came into the room to find them all asleep, as in the image.  This picture is entitled the “Chloroform Party”, but except for the period clothing is reminiscent of a typical spring semester weekend party at UMD using, perhaps, alternative intoxicants.

Of these three gases, ether was the most successful, but was replaced by better agents in later years.  Nitrous oxide is still used in dental applications with good success.