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Summary: One book about anesthesia that won't put you to sleep.
Review: Surgical anesthesia was America's first great scientific gift to the world. Since ancient times, and throughout the history of Europe, surgery, however necessary, was an unimaginable nightmare. Even the simplest procedure understandably stirred intense dread. And almost any sugery could prove fatal because of pain and shock. Of necessity, surgeons had to work at lightning speed, amputating a limb or "cutting for the stone" in minutes. All this changed in 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, when a young man named Gilbert Abbot underwent the first surgery using ether anesthesia. The surgeon was Dr. John C. Warren, whose position and reputation allowed him to take this radical step. The person administering the ether was an ambitious dentist, William Morton, one of the unlikely and ill-fated heroes of the ether story. As Julie Fenster reveals the events that led to and followed from the inception of ether anesthesia, she deftly reveals the human foibles of the key participants: the high-living, risk-taking Morton, the idealistic Horace Wells, and the brilliant and arrogant Charles Jackson. Anesthesia was a great gift to mankind, but it proved the undoing of its flawed discovers. It's a great story, well told and well worth reading. Robert Adler
Author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley, 2002).
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