Foreword

Abstract

Somebody who is interested in the development and spread of anaesthesia as we know it nowadays may get a strange impression that this speciality, together with most of modern medicine, has been chiefly a product of the western world. From the so-called West, anaesthesia seems to have spread to the rest of the world. However, and the present chapter tends to confirm this, little information is available to increase our understanding of the fate of anaesthesia in extensive areas of the world with enormous population masses. Reasons for this may be political, linguistic or economic. The tragedy is that, most probably, much pioneering work is currently being performed in many areas of the world and if this is not recorded now it will soon be too late to do so.