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Previous Volume 341:458-459 August 5, 1999 Number 6 Next

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By Norman A. Bergman. 448 pp., illustrated. Park Ridge, Ill., Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, 1998. $85. ISBN 0-9614932-0-0.

In the first successful public demonstration of surgical anesthesia, dentist William T.G. Morton administered "Letheon," his patented preparation of diethyl ether, to a patient on October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital. But long before that celebrated event, there had been many other efforts to control surgical pain, numerous medical uses of inhaled gases, and several less well publicized successful attempts to use inhalation anesthesia. These three strands of the history of anesthesia before 1846 are the subject of The Genesis of Surgical Anesthesia.

Bergman provides a fascinating, detailed record of attempts to make surgery painless from antiquity to the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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