This Month in Anesthesia: December

Sir Humphry Davy 
[1830 engraving based on the painting by 

Sir Thomas Lawrence]

THIS MONTH IN ANESTHESIA HISTORY: DECEMBER

1298 December 24: Theodoric of Lucca, Italian physician and bishop, died. He developed the "soporific sponges" soaked with opium and mandragora, for surgical pain relief. [See Juvin P, Desmonts JM. The ancestors of inhalational anesthesia: the Soporific Sponges (XIth-XVIIth

centuries): how a universally recommended medical technique was abruptly discarded. Anesthesiology. 2000 Jul;93(1):265-9]

1778 December 17: Humphry Davy was born in Penzance, Cornwall, England. In 1799 in Bristol, England, Davy became the first person to breath nitrous oxide. In 1800 he published a massive book, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide . . . and its Respiration, about the laboratory, animal and human experiments on gases that he, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, and numerous others conducted at Beddoes' Pnemautic Medical Institute. In this book he suggested that nitrous oxide could be used to relieve the pain of some surgeries. After moving to London in 1801, Davy's scientific achievements made him one of the luminaries of the age. He discovered several new elements, was a pioneer in the new field of electrochemistry, and lectured before large audiences. One of his best-known achievements was a very practical one--a miner's lamp designed to dissipate the heat of the flame and thus less likely to ignite the methane gas present in mines. Davy became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1803 and served as its president from 1820 to 1827. He was knighted in 1812 and died in 1829. 

1780 December 26: English physician John Fothergill died in London. Among many other accomplishments, this devout Quaker was the first to accurately describe migraines, and recognized that hardening of the arteries could cause chest pain. In 1744 he published an account of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive the apparently dead. Fothergill was also the first to recognize the symptoms of diphtheria and maintained an extensive botanical garden near Stratford which contained plants from all over the world.  Fothergill was born on March 8, 1712, in Wensleydale, Yorkshire. 

John Fothergill, M.D.  by Gilbert Stuart

1799 December 6: The great Scottish chemist Joseph Black, who isolated carbon dioxide, died. Among numerous others, Black taught Thomas Beddoes when the latter was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh in the 1780s. At the time of his death Black and James Watt were duplicating in Birmingham Beddoes and Davy's work with nitrous oxide in Bristol.

 
Mezzotint engraving of Joseph Black by James Heath after Sir Henry Raeburn

1808 December 24: Dr. Thomas Beddoes died.  He received his M.D. from Oxford in 1786. In the late 1780s Dr. Beddoes began attempts to implement Joseph Priestley's idea for the therapeutic applications of "factitious airs" or gases. By 1798 Beddoes had established the Pneumatic Institute in Clifton, England, and hired the teenage Humphry Davy as Research Director. Their experiments with nitrous oxide and many other gases began the following year. His Notice of Some Observations made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution (I799) is the first substantial publication about human respiration of nitrous oxide. Among numerous other medical and political works, Beddoes authored the classic Observations on the Nature of Demonstrative Evidence [1793], the first work in English to discuss the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Beddoes was born at Shifnal, Shropshire, England, on April 13, 1760.

Thomas Beddoes, M.D.

1844 December 10: Dentist Horace Wells attended a demonstration of nitrous oxide inhalation at Union Hall in Hartford, Connecticut. At this exhibition by Gardner Quincy Colton, Wells conceived the notion of pain relief by gas inhalation, and thus rediscovered an idea Humphry Davy expressed over four decades earlier. However, Wells quickly put the idea into practice. Later in the century Colton single-handedly revived interest in nitrous oxide for dentistry.

1844 December 11: Colton administered nitrous oxide to Wells while another dentist, Dr. John M. Riggs, extracted one of Wells' teeth. This event is thus the first dental use of nitrous oxide.

1846 December 15: Ether anesthesia was first administered in Paris, France. The anesthetic was given by Francis Willis Fisher [1821-1877], a young physician from Boston, for the excision by the French surgeon Jobert of a large cancer on the lower lip of a 59 year-old man. The surgery was performed at St. Louis Hospital. In January 1847 Fisher administered successful anesthesia for cases of two other French surgeons, A.Velpeau and P.J. Roux.  Fisher, an 1845 graduate of Harvard Medical School, lived in Paris from about November 1846 through February 1847. His account of the first Parisian ether anesthetic was published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1847 as “The Ether Inhalation in Paris.” [36:109-113]. 

1846 December 19: English dentist James Robinson administered ether for removal of a diseased molar tooth from a young female patient.

1846 December 21: The first surgical anesthetic with ether is administered in England by William Squire during surgery by Robert Liston. Liston may have given ether to Squire's assistant on either the 19th or 20th as he, William and Peter Squire worked on suitable equipment and technique.

1847 December 7: Robert Liston, first surgeon in England to use ether, died.

1849 December: Crawford Long finally published an account of his 1842 administrations of ether anesthesia in the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal. 

1857 December 3: Carl Koller was born. In the early 1880s he was a house surgeon at the Vienna General Hospital and along with his friend Sigmund Freud studied the physiological effects of cocaine. Freud eventually lost interest, but Koller continued the research and in 1884 discovered the local anesthetic properties of the drug when he injected a weak solution of cocaine into the eye of a frog. Koller died in 1944.

Carl Koller 

1868 December: A committee formed in April by the Odontological Society of Great Britain and the Committee of Management of the Dental Hospital of London to investigate nitrous oxide made its first report. The report recommended the elimination of air inhalation during nitrous oxide administration but also stresses the potential dangers of this method.

1887 December 1: Sherlock Holmes first appears in print in Arthur Conan Doyle's novel A Study in Scarlet, first published in Beeton’s Chritsmas Annual. [see Maltby JR. Sherlock Holmes and anaesthesia. Can J Anaesth 35:58-62, 1988 and Bergman NA. Sherlock Holmes and his gasogene. Pharos58(3): 35-37, summer 1995]

Arthur Conan Doyle

1896 December 10: Alfred Jarry's legendary avant-garde play Ubu Roi opens and closes in Paris. Jarry's play was so scandalous that the audience rioted for fifteen minutes; the spectacle made the young writer famous His other prose and theatrical works also enraged tender French sensibilities, but his work has influenced such artistic movements as Dadaism, Cubism and Surrealism and artists ranging from Picasso to the Marx Brothers and Monty Python. Born in 1873, Jarry was addicted to absinthe and substituted ether sniffing when he could not afford his favorite drink. He died in 1907 at aged 34.

Alfred Jarry

1901 December 17:  Janet G. Travell, a pioneer in the treatment of myofascial pain, wa born in New York City. She was co-author of the two-volume classic Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual. From 1961 to 1963 she served as personal physician to President John F. Kennedy. Dr. Travell died in 1997. You can read more about her in Wilson VP. Janet G. Travell, MD: A Daughter's Recollection. Tex Heart Inst J 30(1):8-12, 2003.  

1907 December 2: Longtime chief of anesthesia at Charity Hospital in New Orleans John Adriani was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He published 13 books and more than 650 articles. He died on June 14, 1968. 

1919 December 18: Dr. Francis McMechan met with representatives from several equipment and pharmaceutical companies that sold products for anesthesia. He wanted them to support research in the field by journal publication and an organization devoted to education and research. The National Anesthesia Research Society resulted from this meeting and in a few years became the International Anesthesia Research Society. A good overview of McMechan’s importance to organized anesthesia is Bacon DR. Francis Hoeffer McMechan, MD: Creator of Modern Anesthesiology? Anesth Analg 2012 Dec; 115: 1393-1400

1945 December 28: American novelist Theodore Dreiser died at age 74 in Hollywood, California. Dreiser's best known works are probably his novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. In February 1915 Dreiser published in Smart Set magazine his one-act play "Laughing Gas" in which a physician having surgery has a mystical experience while under nitrous oxide anesthesia. [see Wright AJ. Theodore Dreiser's "Laughing Gas." Anesth Analg 69:391-392, 1989] Dreiser was born on August 27, 1871, in Sullivan, Indiana. 

Theodore Dreiser c.1910s

1982 December: The first issue of the Newsletter of the Anesthesia History Association was published. The organization, founded by Drs. Selma Calmes and Rod Calverley, was the first in the world devoted to the specialty’s history. In 1995 the publication became the Bulletin of Anesthesia History. In 2015 another change took place; the Journal of Anesthesia History is currently published by Elsevier for the society. All issues of the Newsletter and Bulletin can be found here. 

2000 December 31: Dr. Hiram Elliot died in Birmingham, Alabama. A 1938 graduate of the University of Tennessee School of Medicine, Dr. Elliot became one of the earliest physicians in Alabama to devote his practice to anesthesia. In March, 1948, Dr. Elliot, along with Drs. Alice McNeal, Alfred Habeeb and E. Bryce Robinson, Jr., founded the Alabama State Society of Anesthesiologists. In 1973 Dr. Elliot founded the Anesthesiology Department at Brookwood Hospital and practiced there until his retirement in 1991. An obituary for Dr. Elliot was published in the Birmingham News on January 2, 2001. He was born in Mississippi on June 18, 1913.

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This Month in Anesthesia: November

This Month in Anesthesia History: November 1793 November 28: Antoine Lavoisier surrendered to the French revolutionary government. He was imprisoned and executed by guillotine on May 8, 1794. Known as the “father of modern chemistry,” he named oxygen and hydrogen among many other achievements. 1815 November 1::Crawford W. Long was born in Danielsville, Georgia. On the afternoon of March 30, 1842, in Jefferson, Georgia, Dr. Long removed a small tumor from the neck of James Venable while the patient remained calm after breathing ether vapor. Thus Long performed the first surgical operation under ether anesthesia. Long continued to use ether in several other operations, but failed to report his achievement until after William Morton's public demonstration of ether anesthesia in October, 1846. Crawford W. Long, M.D. 1821 November 9: French writer Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris . Although probably best known for his poetry collectionLesFleurs du mal  [Flowers of Evil, first edition 1857], Baudelaire was also a literary and art critic and beginning in 1848 translated many works of Poe into French. His own dark poetry, often fueled by sessions of hashish smoking, was very controversial during his lifetime. In his essay "Poem of Hashish" [1895], he made some interesting observations about anesthesia: "Despite the admirable services which ether and chloroform have rendered to humanity, it seems to me that from the point of view of the idealist philosophy the same moral stigma is branded on all modern inventions which tend to diminish human free will and necessary pain. It was not without a certain admiration that I once listened to the paradox of an officer who told me of the cruel operation undergone by a French general at El-Aghouat, and of which, despite chloroform, he died. This general was a very brave man, and even something more: one of those souls to which one naturally applies the term chivalrous. It was not, he said to me, chloroform that he needed, but the eyes of all the army and the music of its bands. That might have saved him. The surgeon did not agree with the officer, but the chaplain would doubtless have admired these sentiments." Baudelaire died in Paris from the ravages of syphilis on August 31, 1867, at age 46.   Charles Baudelaire ca. 1863 1832 November 26: American author Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, now a part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is perhaps best known for her novels Little Women and its sequel, Little Men [1871]. However, she also published several successful thrillers under the pseudonym A.B. Barnard. Alcott worked as a nurse for six weeks at a Union hospital in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, and her first significant work, Hospital Sketches [1863] resulted from that experience. This book includes descriptions of the brutal treatment of the wounded soldiers of that time; Alcott observes that "the merciful magic of ether" was not always used in surgery. After contracting typhoid pneumonia during this period, Alcott was treated with large doses of calomel, a compound containing mercury. For the rest of her life, until her death on March 6, 1888, the long-term side effects led her to self-medicate with opium and morphine. Opium addiction is explored in some of her later writings, such as The Marble Woman; or, The Mysterious Model. Louisa May Alcott about age 25 1846 November 7: Surgeon George Hayward performed a leg amputation and a lower jaw removal under ether anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital.  These surgeries were the third and fourth at which Boston dentist William Thomas Green Morton served as anesthetist. 1846 November 9: Henry J. Bigelow, junior surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital, reported on Morton's four successful ether anesthetics at a meeting of the Boston Society for Medical Improvements. 1846 November 12: Letter patent no. 4848 was issued to Charles T. Jackson and William T.G. Morton for 10% of all profits on the use of ether in surgical operations. Because of vociferous opposition from the medical and dental communities to such a patent, Jackson and Morton quickly made their discovery known and freely available. 1846 November 12: The first surgery in private practice under ether anesthesia in Boston took place on this date. J. Mason Warren, son of John Collins Warren, was the surgeon. 1846 November 18: Bigelow's account of Morton’s October administrations at Massachusetts General Hospital was published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, launching the spread of ether anesthesia around the world. 1846 November 21: In a letter to William T.G. Morton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., suggested the word "anaesthesia" to describe the mental state produced by the inhalation of ether vapor.   Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 1847 November 8: In Edinburgh, Scotland, James Young Simpson introduced chloroform into clinical practice. The patient was Wilhelmina Carstairs, daughter of a physician. 1856 November 10: At London's King's College Hospital, John Snow made the first clinical administration of amylene, a gas he had extensively investigated in animals. By July, 1857, Snow abandoned use of the gas after two of his patients died. In the summer of 1857 a New York physician, John G. Orton, published two accounts in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of his use of amylene in a toenail extraction and an obstetric case. Dr. Orton noted that he had obtained the amylene from John Snow. There is a fascinating footnote to the amylene story. In a March 2, 1857, letter, the Paris correspondent of the New York Times reported excitedly on an operation with amylene "for necrosis of the tibia" that he had witnessed. The reporter noted of the patient, "She did not go to sleep, and yet she felt no pain; her eyes remained open during the whole operation, which lasted nearly an hour...." A purified form of amylene, pental (trimethyl ethylene), gained some popularity in Germany and the United Kingdom until the end of the century. 1868 November: Dr. Edmund Andrews published in the Chicago Medical Examiner a paper proposing administration of nitrous oxide with oxygen in a premixed combination of 80 to 20 percent. 1879 November 4: American humorist and author Will Rogers was born in Indian Territory [what is now Oklahoma].  Rogers had a long career on stage, radio and in films; he also wrote some 4,000 syndicated newspaper columns and six books. He was especially known for his political humor. Among his books is Ether & Me...or Just Relax [1937, reprinted in 1973], a humorous account of a visit to the dentist. Along with famed pilot Wiley Post, Rogers died in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, on August 15, 1935. Will Rogers 1883 November 13: James Marion Sims, a surgeon famous for his vesicovaginal operation, died. After Morton's October, 1846, public demonstration of ether anesthesia in Boston, Sims urged Georgia physician Crawford Long to publish an account of operations using ether that Long had performed in 1842. Long's account finally appeared in the December 1849, issue of the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal. Sims was born on January 21, 1813, in South Carolina and received his M.D. from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1835. For some years he practiced in Montgomery, Alabama, but in 1853 moved to New York where two years later he opened the world's first hospital for women. He served a term as President of the American Medical Association in 1876-77. James Marion Sims, M.D.  1884 November 15: Vassily von Anrep published the first extensive account of clinical use of cocaine in a Russian journal. 1894 November 30: Ernst Amory Codman [1869-1940] and Harvey Cushing introduced the anesthetic record on or before this date. 1905 November 5: Actor Joel McCrea was born. In addition to numerous other roles, McCrea starred as William T.G. Morton in The Great Moment [1944], a film biography directed by Preston Sturges. 2001 November 9: The second annual National Anaesthesia Day is held in Great Britain under the auspices of the Royal College of Anaesthetists. The first celebration was held May 25, 2000. 2005 November 5: British novelist John Fowles died at the age of 79. Well-known for such later novels as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles achieved critical and commercial success early with his first novel, The Collector [1963]. That novel tells the story of Frederick Clegg, a meek clerk and butterfly collector who decides to elevate his collecting and kidnaps beautiful art student Miranda Grey as she is walking home from class. Clegg uses a rag soaked in chloroform to subdue her. A film version of the novel appeared in 1965 and featured Terence Stamp as Clegg and Samantha Eggar as Grey. Both novel and film have extended scenes of the criminal use of chloroform. Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England, on March 31, 1926. [For more information on such real-life uses of chloroform, see Payne JP. The criminal use of chloroform. Anaesthesia. 1998 Jul;53(7):685-90]

This Month in Anesthesia: September

This Month in Anesthesia History: September

An earlier version of the calendar, from which this listing was taken, is on the Anesthesia History Association WWW site at http://ahahq.org/Calendar/Calendar.php

Notes about other anesthesia and medical history calendars are there and in the PDF version. 

I am continually adding/revising entries. Suggestions welcome. A public PDF of the latest version is at http://tinyurl.com/kkbleqz

Many items related to anesthesia history can be found in my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/@AJWrightMLS

--A.J. Wright, MLS 

Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.A. 

 

 

John Snow, M.D.

This Month in Anesthesia History: September

1637 September 8: Robert Fludd, an English physician, philosopher and inventor, died. Fludd was one of the earliest physicians to time the pulse.

1677 September 7 [or 17]: Englishman Stephen Hales was born in Bekesbourne, Kent. While a divinity student at Cambridge, he studied botany and chemistry. Hales, who became Vicar of Teddington in 1709, was the first to measure blood flow, blood volume and blood pressure. He reported the results in Statical Essays. Hales also researched the role of air and water in plant and animal life, and developed a ventilator that saved lives aboard ships, and in hospitals and prisons. He demonstrated that the spinal cord mediates some reflexes and invented the surgical forceps. In 1717 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded its Copley Medal in 1739. You can learn more about this fascinating man in I.B. Smith’s article, “The impact of Stephen Hales on medicine” published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1993 [86: 349-352]. Hales died in Teddington on January 4, 1761.

Stephen Hales

1791 September 22: English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday was born at Newington, Surrey, near London. In 1818 Faraday, then a student of Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution in London, published a brief anonymous article in the Quarterly Journal of Science and the Arts in which he noted the lethargic state that could be produced by the inhalation of ether vapor. Faraday is best known for his pioneering experiments in electricity and magnetism. He died on August 25, 1867. Recent biographies are Michael Faraday by Geoffrey Cantor et al (1996) and A Life of Discovery : Michael Faraday, Giant of the Scientific Revolution by James Hamilton (2004).

Michael Faraday

1792 September 27: English caricaturist George Cruikshank was born. In his long career Cruikshank provided illustrations for hundreds of popular books, including John Scoffern's Chemistry No Mystery[1839]. The frontispiece for this title (and the only illustration in the book) depicts the effects of nitrous oxide inhalation at a classroom demonstration. Scoffern's otherwise serious chemistry text contains an entire chapter devoted to such a demonstration. Cruikshank also did several famous caricatures related to pain. Cruikshank, who produced more than 15,000 drawings during his long career, died in 1878.

1811 September 30: On this date English novelist and diarist Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy for suspected breast cancer; she refused any drugs or alcohol except a wine cordial. One of Burney's best known works is Evelina, or The History of A Young Lady's Entrance into the World, her first novel published anonymously in 1778. When her authorship of the popular novel became known, Burney's fame was assured. In 1802 Burney and her family moved to France, where they remained for ten years. Between March and May 1812, Burney wrote a detailed letter describing her experience of surgery without anesthesia. The letter, along with the doctors' report written on October 1, 1811, can be found in Hemlow J, et al, eds.,  The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay)(Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1975, Vol. VI, pp. 596-616). Burney, who was born June 13, 1752, died on January 6, 1840. 

1818 September 26: English obstetrician and physiologist James Blundell was the first to transfuse human blood into another human. Earlier efforts at transfusion had used animal blood. Although the patient in this initial attempt died, Blundell continued his efforts in a total of ten patients, five of whom survived. Blundell published a physiology and pathology text in 1824 and books on obstetrics [1834] and diseases in women [1837]. An article about his transfusion work is Myhre BA. James Blundell--pioneer transfusionist. Transfusion 35:74-78, 1995; an article about his entire professional career is Young JH. James Blundell (1790-1878): Experimental physiologist and obstetrician. Medical History8:159-169, 1964.

1832 September 1: Ephraim Cutter, American physician and inventor of the laryngoscope, was born. Cutter died in New York on April 25, 1917. In its brief obituary, the British Medical Journal noted that “He was one of the early American laryngologists, and invented many instruments.” He received his undergraduate degree from Yale in 1852 and medical degree from Harvard in 1856. On a visit to Europe in 1862, Cutter met the German physiologist Johann N. Czermak and viewed the photograph Czermak had made of his own larynx. In November 1865 Cutter spent a week testing apparatus and methods with photographer F. Willard Hardy as he photographed Cutter’s larynx. In addition to this work and his many instrument designs, Cutter was a prolific author of medical papers on many topics and a pioneer of microphotography. An 1867 paper in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal [now the New England Journal of Medicine] was entitled “On the modes of administration of systemic anaesthetics.”

1846 September 7: Gilbert Abbott consulted Boston surgeon John Collins Warren about a tumor on his neck. Surgery was scheduled for October 13 at Massachusetts General Hospital.

1846 September 30: Boston dentist William Thomas Green Morton anesthetized his patient Eben H. Frost and successfully removed an ulcerated tooth. Frost had requested that Morton mesmerize (hypnotize) him, but the dentist--who had been searching for a pain-relieving agent--tried sulfuric ether instead. Morton's mentor, Harvard professor Charles Thomas Jackson, had suggested sulfuric ether. This event served as prelude to Morton's successful ether anesthesia for surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16 and 17. See  Haridas RP. Ebenezer Hopkins Frost. Anesthesiology. 2012 Aug;117(2):442-5 and Levasseur R, Desai SP. Ebenezer Hopkins Frost (1824-1866): William T.G. Morton's First Identified Patient and Why He Was Invited to the Ether Demonstration of October 16, 1846. Anesthesiology. 2012 Aug;117(2):238-42.

1849 September 1: Outbreak of the Broad Street pump cholera epidemic in London began. This epidemic would be investigated by the great anesthetist John Snow. A recent biography of Snow is Vinten-Johansen P, et al, Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow[Oxford University Press, 2003]. 

John Snow, M.D.

1852 September 23: American surgeon William Stewart Halsted was born in New York City. See note for September 7, 1922, below.

1854 September 20: The Crimean War began with a Franco-British victory over Russian forces in the Battle of Alma. This war “was the first major conflict in which anesthesia was used extensively on the battlefield.” [For an overview of early military uses of anesthesia, see Houghton IT. Some observations on early military anaesthesia. Anaesth Intens Care 34, suppl 1: 6-15, June 2006] Chloroform was widely used by both British and Russian forces.

1866 September 21: Author Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England. Wells wrote The Time Machine [1895], War of the Worlds [1898] and other classic novels as well as many short stories, essays, and non-fiction works. In his story "Under the Knife," first included in a collection published in 1897, the narrator undergoes an operation at home. While under chloroform anesthesia, he has a near-death experience. "I do not think I saw. I do not think I heard; but I perceived all that was going on, and it was as if I both heard and saw. Haddon was bending over me, Mowbray behind me; the scalpel...was cutting my flesh..." Wells died on August 13, 1946. 

H. G. Wells 

1869 September 17: Physician and famed thesaurus-maker Peter Mark Roget died. In 1799 Roget, just out of medical school, worked in Humphry Davy's laboratory at the Pneumatic Institute in Clifton, England, where Davy, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, and many others were researching nitrous oxide. Among Roget's many publications was the biographical entry on Beddoes in an early edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Roget was born on January 18, 1779, in London.

1873 September 8: French author Alfred Jarry was born; his family background included both nobility and insanity. At age 23 his play “Ubu Roi” premiered in Paris; its scandalous nature caused a riot. The outrageousness of that play and Jarry's other writings make him seem the godfather of much 20th century art--from Surrealism to the Marx Brothers and Monty Python. Jarry died of tuberculosis in 1907, after years of addiction to opium, absinthe and ether. 

1884 September 15: A colleague of Dr. Carl Koller's reported to the Heidelberg Congress of Ophthalmology Koller's successful use of cocaine as a local anesthetic.

1888 September 26: Poet and playwright Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis. One of the great English-language poems of the twentieth-century, Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," was first published in Poetry magazine in June 1915. Eliot had actually completed the poem several years earlier. This portrait of modern spiritual and emotional paralysis opens with the lines "Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table..." The month after its publication, Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood, who later became addicted to ether; she died in 1945. Their relationship is depicted in the 1994 film Tom and Viv. Eliot moved to London in 1915, where he died in 1965. Among his other many famous works is the long poem The Waste Land. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

T. S. Eliot, 1934

1889 September 23: English author Wilkie Collins died. Collins wrote such classic novels as The Woman in White [1860] and The Moonstone [1868]. Some of his works, including Man and Wife and The Haunted Hotel, feature non-medical uses of chloroform. Collins was born on January 8, 1824. 

Wilkie Collins

1921 September 15: Gordon Stanley Ostlere, English surgeon and anesthesiologist, was born. Under the penname Richard Gordon, Dr. Ostlere has written, among other novels, the humorous "Doctor in the House" series of books that have spawned films and television and radio series in Britain. Under his own name he has published Anaesthetics for Medical Students in 1949; the tenth edition appeared as Ostlere and Bryce-Smith's Anaesthetics for Medical Students in 1989. Dr. Ostlere also authored Anaesthetics and the Patient (1949) and Trichlorethylene Anaesthesia (1953). 

1922 September 7: American surgeon William Stewart Halsted died in Baltimore, Maryland. Halsted was one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Medical School, and the first pair of rubber surgical gloves were made under his direction by the Goodyear Rubber Company. He also pioneered many surgical techniques, studied hemostasis and wound healing, and contributed many articles to the medical literature. Along with William H. Welch, William Osler, and Howard Kelly, Halsted is one of "The Four Doctors" in John Singer Sargent's famous 1905 painting. Halsted was one of the first American surgeons to research cocaine as a local anesthetic and his self-experimentation led to addiction. He was born on September 23, 1852, in New York City. A recent article about Halsted is Markel H. The accidental addict. N Engl J Med. 2005 Mar 10;352(10):966-8.

1939 September 23: Sigmund Freud died in London at age 83. In the mid-1880s Freud and Carl Koller [see 1884 September 15] studied the physiological effects of cocaine.

1941 September: Thomas Keys, librarian at the Mayo Clinic, began publication of a series of five articles entitled "The Development of Anesthesiology" in the journal Anesthesiology (2:552-574, Sept 1941). This series eventually resulted in Keys' classic book, The History of Surgical Anesthesia, first published in 1945 and still in print today. Keys was born in 1902 in Greenville, Mississippi. He graduated from the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School in 1934 and immediately went to work at the Mayo Clinic library. He remained there in various capacities until his retirement in 1972. He authored or co-authored numerous papers related to various aspects of the history of medicine. Keys died in 1995; an obituary can be found in Bull Med Libr Assoc 85(2): 219-220, April 1997 which is here.

1952 September 21: At a medical meeting Dr. Virginia Apgar made the first formal presentation of her newborn scoring system. 

1955 September 10: The television western series Gunsmoke premiered on the CBS network. The program lasted until March 1975 and produced 635 episodes. A radio version ran from 1952 until 1961. Since one of the regular characters was a physician, Galen “Doc” Adams, a number of shows featured medical topics. In “Doctor’s Wife”, for instance, Doc Adams and a new physician in town have a spirited debate over the value of Joseph Lister’s use of carbolic acid spray to fight wound sepsis in surgery. Several episodes have some connection to anesthesia. “Laughing Gas” [which also appeared in a radio version] features a former gunfighter whose medicine show includes demonstrations of nitrous oxide inhalation. In “Gold Train: The Bullet” Sheriff Matt Dillon is attacked and wounded with a bullet near his spine. Although at first reluctant, Doc finally decides to operate with saloon owner Kitty Russell as his anesthetist. She is seen dripping the anesthetic liquid from a small bottle onto a mask over Matt’s face before Doc begins surgery. "Miss Kitty" also serves as anesthetist in a surgery scene in "The Pillagers". She and Dr. Newly O'Brien are prisoners of an outlaw gang hiding out in an abandoned mine. One shot in the scene shows Kitty using a wire frame mask with gauze and pouring anesthetic from a can.

The cast of Gunsmoke
CBS-TV 1955-1975
Source: http://tnwordsmith.blogspot.com/2012/06/gunsmoke-journal-1-dodge-city-and-me.html

This Month in Anesthesia: July

James Watt 

This Month in Anesthesia History: August

1743 August 26: Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was born in Paris. Among his many accomplishments he researched and named oxygen. He was beheaded during the French revolution on May 8, 1794.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Line engraving by Louis Jean Desire Delaistre, after a design by Julien Leopold Boilly

1774 August 12: Robert Southey, future English poet laureate and biographer of Lord Nelson, was born. Southey was also one of numerous famous or soon-to-be famous individuals who participated in the nitrous oxide experiments conducted in 1799 and 1800 by Dr. Thomas Beddoes and Humphry Davy at the Pneumatic Medical Institute in Clifton, just outside Bristol, England.

1809 August 29: American physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes was born. In 1846 Holmes suggested the word "anaesthesia" for the state of unconsciousness William T.G. Morton induced with ether in patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

1819 August 9: William Thomas Green Morton, was born in Charlton City, Massachusetts. In October, 1846, Morton--a dentist--made the first successful “public” demonstration of surgical anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Morton's story is told most recently in a massive biography by Richard Wolfe, Tarnished Idol: William Thomas Green Morton and the Introduction of Surgical Anesthesia; A Chronicle of the Ether Controversy. (Norman Publishing, 2001) Morton died on July 15, 1868, in New York City. 

1819 August 25: James Watt died near Birmingham, England. Watt, of workable steam engine fame, developed a partnership in the mid-1780s with Thomas Beddoes as Beddoes attempted to market his therapeutic applications of Priestley's "factitious airs" or gases. Watt developed equipment for Beddoes' use; some of this equipment was later used in Bristol during the nitrous oxide experiments of 1799 and 1800. Watt, his wife, and one of his sons, James Jr., participated along with numerous others in those experiments.

1842 August 26:  Heinrich Irenaeus Quincke, German internist was born in Frankfurt an der Oder  Among other notable medical achievements, in the early 1890s  Quincke introduced lumbar puncture as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool. Quincke died on May 19, 1922.

Heinrich Irenaeus Quincke

1849 August 23: English poet, critic and editor William Ernest Henley was born. As a young man, Henley underwent an operation for a club foot. This experience resulted in a series of poems published as In Hospital (1873-75). In one of those poems, "Before", Henley wrote: "Behold me waiting--waiting for the knife./A little while, and at a leap I storm/ The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform,/The drunken dark, the little death-in-life." The complete text of the collection can be found athttp://www.victorianweb.org/authors/henley/inhospital/contents.html  In addition to his own work, Henley wrote several plays with his friend Robert Louis Stevenson. Henley died in 1903. 

W.E. Henley

1867 August 25: English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday died. In 1818 Faraday, a student of Humphry Davy, published a brief anonymous article in the Quarterly Journal of Science and the Arts in which he noted the lethargic state that could be produced by the inhalation of ether vapor. Faraday is best known for his pioneering experiments in electricity and magnetism. He was born September 22, 1791, at Newington, Surrey, near London. A recent biography isMichael Faraday by Geoffrey Cantor et al (1996). 

Michael Faraday

1868 August: Joseph Thomas Clover presented his paper "On the Administration of Nitrous Oxide" at the British Medical Association meeting at Oxford.

Posed photograph of Joseph T. Clover administering anesthesia

1868 August: Coxeter and Son in England began marketing an apparatus employing a cylinder of gas, a reservoir bag and a Clover face mask.

1869 September 23:  American poet Edgar Lee Masters was born. In his classic collection Spoon River Anthology, Masters includes the story of "Searcy Foote" who murders his invalid Aunt Persis because she won't let him go away to college: "And a bottle of chloroform on the book,/ She used sometimes for an aching tooth!/ I poured the chloroform on a handkerchief/ And held it to her nose till she died." Foote got away with the crime and inherited his aunt's fortune. Masters died in 1950.

1871 August 27: American author Theodore Dreiser was born in Sullivan, Indiana. Dreiser's best known works are probably his novelsSister Carrie and An American Tragedy. In February 1915 Dreiser published in Smart Set magazine his one-act play "Laughing Gas" in which a physician having surgery has a mystical experience while under nitrous oxide anesthesia. [see Wright AJ. Theodore Dreiser's "Laughing Gas." Anesth Analg 69:391-392, 1989] Dreiser died on December 28, 1945, in Hollywood, California.

Theodore Dreiser, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933

1875 August 4: Danish author Hans Christian Andersen died in Copenhagen. Andersen was a frequent traveler and kept a diary during his trips. In August, 1847, he visited Edinburgh, Scotland, for several days. Several dinners were arranged by the locals for this famous author, and on the night of August 17 Andersen and numerous others dined at the house of prominent physician James Young Simpson. In his autobiography, Andersen wrote that "...in the large circle which was gathered there several experiments were made with breathing in ether. I thought it distasteful, especially to see ladies in this dreamy intoxication...there was something unpleasant about it, and I said so, recognizing at the same time that it was a wonderful and blessed invention to use in painful operations..." Simpson did not discover the anesthetic properties of chloroform until November of that year. [See Secher O. Hans Andersen and James Young Simpson. Br J Anaesth 44:1212-1216, 1972] Andersen was born in Odense on April 2, 1805. 

Hans Christian Andersen 
Photograph taken by Thora Hallager, 1869

1897 August 10:  On this date a thirty-year old German chemist, Felix Hoffman, synthesized a batch of acetylsalicylic acid, a combination of salicylic acid and acetyl chloride. Salicylic acid occurs in the bark of certain willow trees and has been known as an analgesic since at least the first century A.D. In 1838 salicylic acid was isolated, but alone produces stomach pain and in large doses gastrointestinal bleeding. A French scientist combined it with acetyl chloride in 1853 to produce a less irritating analgesic, but his discovery was forgotten until Hoffman's work. Hoffman's employer, the Bayer Company, quickly began to market the drug as Aspirin.

1898 August 10: Gardner Quincy Colton died in Geneva, Switzerland.

1898 August 16: Surgeon August Bier of Greifswald, Germany, administered the first spinal anesthetic, a solution of cocaine, in a human, his assistant Hildebrandt. Bier had previously tried the technique successfully in animals. Soon Bier used the technique in patients. [See Goerig M, Agarwal K, Schulte am Esch J. The versatile August Bier (1861-1949), father of spinal anesthesia. J Clin Anesth. 2000 Nov;12(7):561-9 AND  Van Zundert A, Goerig M. August Bier 1861-1949. A tribute to a great surgeon who contributed much to the development of modern anesthesia on the 50th anniversary of his death. Reg Anesth Pain Med. 2000 Jan-Feb;25(1):26-33]

1898 August 29: Author and film director Preston Sturges was born in Chicago, Illinois. Sturges became well-known for such films as The Great McGinty [1940] and Sullivan's Travels [1942]. Sturges also wrote and directed The Great Moment [1944], based on the life of William T.G. Morton, and the only Hollywood feature film ever made about the history of anesthesia. . Morton was played by Joel McCrea, who had also starred in Sullivan's Travels. Sturges died in New York City on August 6, 1959. [See Heynick F. William T.G. Morton and "The Great Moment". J Hist Dent. 2003 Mar;51(1):27-35. ]

1899 August 9: Author Pamela Lyndon Travers was born [as Helen Lyndon Goff] in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia. She wrote as P.L. Travers and her best-known work is Mary Poppins [1934], the first of 11 books featuring the character. The Disney film version was released on August 29, 1964. One chapter from the book, "Laughing Gas," set at Uncle Albert Wigg's birthday party, was filmed for the movie and almost removed by Walt Disney. However, after numerous viewings of the scene featuring raucous laughter by actors Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and Ed Wynn, Disney allowed it to remain in the finished film. The chapter was published individually as Mr. Wigg's Birthday Party in the Little Golden Books series in 1952. P.L. Travers died on April 23, 1996. 

P.L. Travers, appearing in the role of Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream

1910 August 26: American psycholgist William James died. Among his many other accomplishments, James self-experimented with nitrous oxide inhalation and left a brief but vivid description of his experience. James was also a long-time supporter of the philosophy Benjamin Paul Blood described in his work The Anaesthetic Revelation [1874].

1935 August 15:  American humorist and author Will Rogers died. Rogers was born on November 4, 1879, in Indian Territory [what is now Oklahoma].  Rogers had a long career on stage, radio and in films; he also wrote some 4,000 syndicated newspaper columns and six books. He was especially known for his political humor. Among his books is Ether & Me...or Just Relax [1937, reprinted in 1973], a humorous account of a visit to the dentist. Along with famed pilot Wiley Post, Rogers died in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. Learn more about Rogers at http://www.cmgww.com/historic/rogers/index.php  

1935 August 17: Feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman commited suicide in Pasadena, California. In the note she left behind, Perkins [who was a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction] said she "chose chloroform over [breast] cancer" pain. The use of chloroform by suicides was apparently wide-spread for several decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tom Roberts, the father of Mary Roberts Rinehart--one of the most successful American writers of the first half of the twentieth century--committed suicide in 1895 with chloroform, assisted by a gunshot through the heart. A search of the New York Times archive for the period produces dozens of articles with titles like “Suicide by Chloroform”, “Suicide Uses Chloroform” and also “Nurse Commits Suicide” [by placing her head in a pan of chloroform!]. No doubt other newspapers around the country were also filled with such sad cases. A very odd account appeared in the New York Timeson March 1, 1905: “Suicide Agreed with Osler; Old Man in St. Louis Chloroformed Himself After Reading Lecture.” The gentleman had apparently taken seriously William Osler’s notorious, tongue-in-cheek lecture remark the previous month that men [but not women!] over the age of sixty were useless and should seek “peaceful departure by chloroform.”  His remarks had been widely reported—and condemned-in the national press. [See Johnson JA. Osler recommends chloroform at sixty. Pharos 59: 24-26, 1996]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1937 August 11: Novelist Edith Wharton died in France. Among her numerous novels is Twilight Sleep [1927], a satirical portrait of the wealthy during the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The novel includes scenes of the administration of scopolamine for pain relief during childbirth, a popular method of the day called "twilight sleep." Wharton was born January 24, 1862, in New York City. 

1955 August 21: Noel Alexander Gillespie, died of a heart attack in Madison, WI at the age of 50.  Emily Rieder, Noel's mother, befriended T. E. Lawrence while she was a teacher at the American Mission School in Jabail, Syria.  Lawrence suggested books for Noel to read and advised Emily about Noel's education.  Gillespie took a leave of absence from his studies as an Oxford undergraduate and traveled to Lambarene with Albert Schweitzer in 1924.  He received a D. M. degree from Oxford based on the first thesis concerning anesthesia, "Endotracheal Nitrous Oxide-Oxygen-Ether Anaesthesia in Neurological Surgery."  He trained in anaesthetics at London Hospital and later was elected to the consultant staff.  Gillespie invented the Shadwell Laryngoscope in 1936, named after the pediatric hospital where he was working with the plastic surgeon, T. P. Kilner.  In 1935 Noel visited prominent American anesthetists during a three month tour.  He spent two weeks in Madison, Wisconsin with Ralph Waters.  The next year Gillespie hosted the Waters family during their trip to England.  During this trip Waters spoke on cyclopropane to the British Medical Association meeting in Oxford in July and on carbon dioxide absorption to the Anaesthetic Section of the Royal Society of Medicine in October.  Gillespie left his practice at the London Hospital and joined Waters at the University of Wisconsin in May 1939.  He wrote his classic monograph, Endotracheal Anaesthesia, (University of Wisconsin Press, 1941) while in Madison. [Entry written by Mark Schroeder, M.D.]

1970 August: Drs. H.J.C. Swan and William Ganz of Los Angeles introduced the pulmonary artery catheter into clinical practice.

1974: August 7: Virginia Apgar, obstetric anesthesiologist who developed the famous scoring system for evaluating newborns, died in New York City.

1989 August 28: Sir Robert Reynolds Macintosh died after head injuries sustained during a fall. Although born in New Zealand in 1897, Sir Robert moved to England at the start of World War I and that remained his home. In February 1943 he published an article in _Lancet_ about the laryngoscope blade that bears his name. He published four books on regional anesthesia between the late 1940s and early 1950s. After World War II he devoted much effort to improving anesthetic practice in developing countries. [see Boulton TB. Professor Sir Robert Macintosh, 1897-1989: personal reflections on a remarkable man and his career.Reg Anesth 18:145-154, 1993]

2008 August 11: Dr. Leslie Rendell-Baker died in Redlands, California. Dr. Rendell-Baker was born in St. Helens, Lancashire, England, on March 27, 1917. He received his M.D. from Guy's Hospital Medical School in London in 1941 and entered the Royal Army Medical Corps the following year. After training in Scotland, Dr. Rendell-Baker and his medical team landed at Queen Red Beach on D-Day; he continued to serve in Europe until Christmas, 1946. After the war he trained in anesthesia at Guy's Hospital and then settled permanently in the U.S. in 1957. He spent several years at Western Reserve University Hospital in Cleveland, and then served as Chair of the Anesthesiology Department at Mount Sinai Hospital and Medical School in NYC from 1962 until 1979. He then moved to California where he held a post at the VA Hospital in Loma Linda until his retirement in 1998. Dr. Rendell-Baker co-authored three anesthesia textbooks, 11 book chapters and numerous journal articles. In the 1960s he and dental surgeon Dr. Donald Soucek developed a face mask for use in children that became a world-wide standard. That device is described in Dr. Rendell-Baker's entry in Notable Names in Anaesthesia [J. Roger Maltby, ed., 2002, pp. 173-175] During his later years, Dr. Rendell-Baker pursued an interest in the history of his specialty.