RECENT ADVANCES IN ANESTHESIA? 
By JOHN C. KRANTz, JR. 
Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, 
University of Maryland, Baltimore, Md. 
INTRODUCTION 
“Nothing in the whole realm of human effort has ever contributed so much to 
human comfort as the discovery of modern anesthesia.” 
Pain and discomfort are the arch enemies of man. To escape them 
and effectually combat them, he has ransacked the entire earth to find 
drugs to bring him a surcease of pain. During the middle of the 
sixteenth century Ambroise Paré operated without anesthesia, except 
for the administration of French wines, which would produce an 
alcoholic stupor. Only 120 years have passed since Ephraim Mc- 
Dowell removed an ovarian cyst from Mrs. Jane Crawford in Dan- 
ville, Ky., without any anesthetic agent. She was then 47 years old 
and lived to see her seventy-eighth birthday. It is difficult for man 
today to appreciate the excruciating pain suffered by surgical patients 
in the preanesthetic days and, further, no one can with certainty esti- 
mate the impediment to surgical progress that the absence of 
anesthesia produced. 
NITROUS OXIDE 
Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, prepared the first gen- 
erally accepted anesthetic. Priestley was a Unitarian minister in 
Birmingham, England. In the congregation of this brilliant scien- 
tist-clergyman were three illustrious men: James Watt, who discov- 
ered the power of steam and holds the admiration of men in all walks 
of life; Erasmus Darwin, brilliant scientist and skilled clinician 
whose grandson, Charles, established a new order in biology; and 
William Withering, “Flower of English Physicians,” discoverer of 
the use of the purple foxglove in edema of cardiac origin. In the year 
1773, Joseph Priestley made nitrous oxide. To him it was a new 
chemical compound, a gas whose physical properties should be inves- 
tigated. Priestley was unconcerned with its biological effects and died 
in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, not knowing that nitrous 
oxide would confer a blessing of inestimable magnitude upon man. 
A quarter of a century passed. Sir Humphry Davy, brilliant Eng- 
lish chemist and physicist, made “Priestley’s gas.” It was then desig- 
nated in chemical reports as ‘‘dephlogisticated nitrous gas.” Davy 
1 Reprinted by permission from the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, 
Scientific Edition, yol.'82, No. 11, November 1943. 
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