HEALTH

The End of Surgical Pain

1846 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Before October 1846, surgery and pain were synonymous: operations were sprints against a screaming clock. Then a Boston dentist, William Morton, put a patient to sleep with ether vapour before an audience of sceptical surgeons, and the patient felt nothing. News crossed the Atlantic in weeks. With pain removed, surgery could slow down, go deeper and eventually open the chest, the abdomen and the brain, once germ theory had made it survivable too.

Why it matters

Anaesthesia is among the few inventions that changed what it feels like to be human: one of our species' oldest and most universal terrors, the pain of the knife, simply ended. It also redefined medicine's ambitions, making possible everything from caesarean birth without agony to transplant surgery. Almost every person in the modern world will, at some point, owe a day of their life to it.

Dating & uncertainty

On 16 October 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, the dentist William Morton anaesthetized a patient with ether while John Collins Warren operated: the first public demonstration of surgical anaesthesia. The report spread worldwide within months. What followed was a century and a half of refinement, from chloroform to intravenous agents, breathing tubes and modern monitoring.

Sources

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:1049.4 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day

See it on the timeline