"The Employment of Anesthetics"

L’Anestesia, an 18^th century Italian satire. A dentist prepares his patient for a “painless” extraction with the help of a club in this comic illustration. Harvard Medical Library collection, Center for the History of Medicine in the Francis A. Countway Library, Harvard University

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The Employment of Anesthetics. “The value of the anesthetic and the radical and beneficent transformation it has effected in surgical practice call for no comment in this place. The changes that the discovery has wrought in the personality of the surgeon, in his bearing, in his methods, and in his capabilities are as wondrous as the discovery itself. The operator is undisturbed by the harass of alarms and the misery of giving pain. He can afford to be leisurely without fear of being regarded as timorous. To the older surgeon every tick of the clock upon the wall was a mandate for haste, every groan of the patient a call for hurried action, and he alone did best who had the quickest fingers and the hardest heart. Time now counts for little, and success is no longer to be measured by the beatings of a watch. The mask of the anaesthetist has blotted out the anguished face of the patient, and the horror of a vivisection on a fellow-man has passed away. Thus it happens that the surgeon has gained dignity, calmness, confidence, and, not least of all, the gentle hand.”

—Address in Surgery by Frederick Treves, F.R.C.S., at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association at Ipswich, August, 1900. British Medical Journal, Volume. 2, 1900, page 288.