In the Name of Safety

Abstract

The emergence of anaesthesia as a specialist practice during the last decades of the nineteenth century was a peculiarly English (and mainly London-driven) phenomenon. We have seen how Snow swiftly established himself as a specialist practitioner, and after his death in 1858 this pattern was continued through the 1860s and 1870s by doctors like Henry Potter, Joseph Clover and Joseph Mills who followed his principles and method. By the 1880s, a majority of the London teaching hospitals had designated posts for administrators and it was primarily these individuals — Dudley W Buxton, Frederic Hewitt and Frederick Silk, for example — who campaigned to make the study of anaesthesia a compulsory part of medical education and who formed the first professional association of anaesthetists in 1893. By the time the jubilees of the discovery of ether and chloroform were celebrated in 1896–97, anaesthesia was a recognised specialism in England, founded on a body of knowledge and practice that was distinguished from surgery. The anaesthetist was ‘a man of science’ who had the experience to render any patient insensible to the pain of surgery, claimed Buxton in his 1897 oration.¹ But why did specialist anaesthesia emerge, and chiefly in England?