Conclusion: The History of Anaesthesia

Abstract

Twenty-first century anaesthesia with its sophisticated and ‘high-tech’ repertoire of drugs and techniques appears worlds away from the early use of ether and chloroform. Many of the dangers that Snow and the later specialists faced, particularly in regard to chloroform, have been obviated with the introduction of new gases such as halothane. Yet the purpose of the process — to save patients the pain of surgery — has not changed, and although the risk to life from anaesthesia has diminished — anaesthetic-related mortality is around 1:100,000 administrations — it remains of pivotal concern to practitioners. The ‘focus of training in anaesthesia is concerned with the avoidance of disasters’, noted Professor Aitkenhead in 1997.¹ The history of anaesthesia in the 1900s and onwards is beyond the scope of this book. But this concluding chapter seeks to summarise what anaesthesia tells us about nineteenth-century medicine and to sketch out some of the historical concerns which persist in the anaesthesia of the twenty-first century.