The History and Benefits of Anesthesia

The creation of anesthesia is the greatest breakthrough since the wheel. It has not only helped the development of medicine in the doctoring field, but has also helped in the dentistry field. Without anesthesia, medical surgeries would not be possible. Some of the procedures that need to be done then and now would not be possible without some type of anesthetic. They are far too painful to be done on a conscious person. Although the original anesthetics are not used anymore, they were used to further advance anesthesia and helped to develop better methods and medicine.

The word anesthesia is used to describe the process of making a patient unconscious which allows them to be free of surgical pain. There are two main types of anesthetics that were used when for surgical anesthesia, ether and chloroform, that developed around the same time. They were both developed in the 1840’s, but chloroform was used more often since it worked faster and was non-flammable. These anesthetics were indispensible tools to the medical doctors during the Civil War. Boston dentist William T.G. Morton was f...