The birth and evolution of anaesthesia in the nineteenth century: historical and epistemological considerations

Nowadays, with regard to the outcome of mortality, anaesthesia is one of the safest medical procedures available. Its effectiveness has a current solid base of experimental and clinical evidence and numerous surgical interventions are performed daily with local or general anaesthesia. However, only just two hundred years ago the available ways of controlling pain, especially during surgery, were neither effective nor safe. The rise of a really effective anaesthesia may be traced to the eighteen hundreds, since in that period considerable progress was achieved with regard to anaesthetic interventions and procedures. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the affirmation of anaesthetic techniques was slow and not immediate, but from the forties onwards the expansion and diffusion of efficacious anaesthesia was particularly swift. In the second half of the eighteen hundreds the introduction of multiple anaesthetic substances and the availability of enhanced apparatuses for gas administration led, both in Europe and in the USA, to the attribution of the full status of scientific branch of medicine to research and practice in anaesthesia. The birth and development of anaesthetic techniques and the evolution of anaesthesia as we know it today, provide, in the historical and epistemological fields, significant models for the complex and fruitful synergy of different sciences, medical sectors and specialties.