[Premedication, preoperative and postoperative visits. Importance as reflected in anaesthesiology textbooks]

Proceeding from German and English language textbooks on anaesthesia as sources, this article asks what concepts of preoperative and postoperative visits have dominated since 1880 and what types of premedication have been preferred. The idea of obligatory premedication became widespread in the first third of the twentieth century. The premedication approach was gradually supplanted by concepts of anaesthesia introduction (basal anaesthesia). The preoperative visit was usually a separate topic in the textbooks and the focus was on the patient's psyche. Much less attention was devoted to the postoperative visit. The current emphasis on the postoperative visit in the framework of perioperative anaesthesia is barely dealt with at all in the textbooks that were consulted.