[Dimensio]

Do you know that the idea of anesthesia came from a scientist reading Genesis and seeing how God put Adam into a deep sleep?

Do you have a reference for this claim? I was not aware of this particular aspect of the history of anesthesia.

[andysandmikesmom]

Do you know that the idea of anesthesia came from a scientist reading Genesis and seeing how God put Adam into a deep sleep?

Do you have a reference for this claim? I was not aware of this particular aspect of the history of anesthesia..

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Frankly, I was also curious about this assertion about anesthesia...just did a brief Google search and found this rather long, but interesting article about a dentist with an open, scientific mind, who was concerned with the pain his dental patients often experienced with tooth extractions...with this concern in mind, he noticed the effects of nitrous oxide(laughing gas) on someone in the audience of a 'side show' promoter...a chance encounter....nothing about a scientist reading Genesis and seeing how God put Adam into a deep sleep...just a scientist being in the right place at the right time, to witness something which he thought might become medically important and revolutionary...read the link...its informative and interesting, tho a bit long, but worth the read...
http://www.dent.ucla.edu/pic/visitors/anesthesia.html

[Doctor Stochastic]

"I also attended on two occasions the operating theatre in the hospital at Edinburgh, and saw two very bad operations, one on a child, but I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform. The two cases fairly haunted me for many a long year."
-Charles Darwin, Autobiography

“Grant’s consumption (of cigars) zoomed to 20 stogies a day, a habit he continued until doctors ordered him to quit in 1884. He died of throat cancer in 1885, after losing 70 of his 200 pounds and becoming addicted to cocaine to ease the pain.”
- “A Stogie Warning, chic-and dangerous,” Newsweek, December 2, 1996, p. 75.Link

The first surgical anesthetic use of ether is credited to Dr. Crawford Williamson Long, MD, age 27, of Jefferson, Georgia. On March 30, 1842, he removed one of the two tumors from the neck of Mr. James Venable under ether anesthesia.