ABOVE: andrzej krauze
Iam no fan of anesthesia. The feeling of being rendered unconscious to facilitate the manipulation of my body, only to be reanimated afterward, gives me, like many people (I assume), the heebie-jeebies. But alas, anesthesia is a medical necessity. It has made lifesaving surgeries and once-dreaded dental procedures pain-free and relatively routine for more than 150 years. My own medical care, not to mention that of billions of other people and animals, has benefited greatly from this chemical control of consciousness.
Beyond my personal misgivings, anesthesia’s development into a widely accepted medical protocol illustrates an interesting, if outmoded, avenue of innovation—let’s call it efficacy sans mechanism. As described here by scientists Emery Brown and Francisco Flores in their dispatch from the front lines of anesthesia research, in the mid-19th century, dentist William Morton successfully put a patient under general anesthesia (using ether vapor, in this case) in ...
