I had never concieved of it, yet with the advent of anæsthesia, there came a resistance to the utility of it for surgical interventions!
Before the advent of anaesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy - a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today.
The introduction of diethyl ether CH3CH2OCH2CH3 (1846) and chloroform CHCl3 (1847) as general anaesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anaesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations. So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganised resistance.
Utopian surgery? The case against anaesthesia in surgery, dentistry and childbirth
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