Anaesthesia in London: John Snow’s Casebooks

Abstract

Some historians have claimed that aside from humanitarian benefits, anaesthesia did not affect surgery in any significant way until surgeons had gained control over the problem of infection through antisepsis techniques in the 1870s. Greene, for example, compared the types of operations performed between 1846 and the 1870s and concluded that anaesthesia had ‘little immediate effect’ on the development of surgery.¹ It is certainly true that the use of ether and chloroform did not remove the risk of post-operative wound infection, and surgical mortality remained relatively unchanged until the 1870s. But, as this chapter will show, by providing a solution to the problem of surgical pain, anaesthesia changed surgical thinking and practice, and revolutionised patient attitudes to operations.