If you have ever undergone a surgical procedure in a hospital or clinic, you must have been remembering administrating a pre-calculated dosage of anesthesia, either local or general. And soon, you lose every sensation and after you regain consciousness, you find that the surgical; procedure is long over. Without the anesthesia, almost every surgical procedure would be impossible to carry out, particularly in these days.

But have you ever wondered how surgical procedures were carried out before the time when anesthesia was formulated? After all, the history of surgery goes long back in time. Let’s understand how the anesthesia came to existence.

Anesthesia performs three major functions, it enables the patient to feel any pain during the surgery, it enables the body to keep performing the vital actions, such as heartbeat, respiration etc and simultaneously, it disables the body to carry out any movements, let it be voluntary, or reflex.

In the earliest stages of surgical procedures, the patient was given a dosage of alcohol, opium or cannabis, as they used to minimize the sensation, mainly the pain. But unlike, toady’s procedure, they were not up to the mark. With time acupuncture needle was substituted in place of oral anesthesia. Gradually came the time when carotid compression is used to achieve unconsciousness before surgery.

It was Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, who pioneered intravenous anesthesia.

Then came an era of hypnosurgery, in which the patient is hypnotized by a professional hypnologist before the procedure begins. This procedure was pioneered by Dr. Jules Cloquet, who carried out a hypnosurgery on women for breast surgery. Supposedly, the patient under hypnosis experience tingling like sensation instead of pain, throughout the procedure. Despite the question of its viability, several notable cases have been witnessed, which was done as hypnosurgery. However, this procedure depends on the willpower of each patient and thus, does not work well for every individual and cannot be counted as a reliable anesthetic substitute.

William Morton is a notable name who initiated the use of ether as anesthesia for surgery and created a revolutionary history. With the advancement of research and development, several new anesthetic substances were formulated from time to time, each surpassing the benefits over the previous ones. Depending upon the type of surgery, either local or general anesthesia is administrated.

In the present scenario, most anesthesia is intravenous and having an anesthesiologist or anesthetist is extremely crucial in any major surgery. Without their supervision and administration of anesthesia, the surgical procedure cannot initiate. During the operation, the anesthesiologist makes sure the patient’s body keep performing all the three crucial actions, as mentioned above.

In this, World Anesthesia Day, we at ILS Hospitals, pay our tributes to each and every one who worked hard immensely to invent the anesthesia, and made the surgical procedures, a rather comforting and bearable procedure.