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Dec 24, 1298
Surgical Pain Relief.
Theodoric of Lucca, Italian physician and bishop, dies. He had used sponges soaked with opium and mandragora for surgical pain relief. -
Jan 1, 1525
Ether
Ether is first used on animals by Paracelsus. -
Jan 1, 1540
Valerius Cordus
Valerius Cordus first synthesizes diethyl ether by distilling ethanol and sulphuric acid. -
Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley is born near Leeds. Among many other achievements, this Unitarian minister and scientist isolated nitrous oxide. In 1774 Priestley wrote about his research on gases, "I cannot help flattering myself that, in time, very great medicinal use will be made of the application of these different kinds of airs..." -
Thomas Beddoes
Thomas Beddoes is born in Shropshire. Beddoes began to explore the potential medical uses of gases in the late 1780s. He was assisted by none other than James Watt, who developed some equipment for Beddoes' use. In 1798 Beddoes founded the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol, England, where Humphry Davy did his nitrous oxide research. He died on 24th December 1808. -
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier is beheaded in the early days of the French Revolution. It was Lavoisier who had discovered oxygen. It is said that he had told his friends that he would start blinking as the guillotine blade fell and they were to to see how long his eyes carried on blinked after his head was severed. The result was some 15 seconds! -
Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Ferdinand Serturner
Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Ferdinand Serturner, an assistant apothecary, discovers morphine, the active ingredient in laudanum and names it after Morpheus - the Greek god of dreams. -
Henry Hill Hickman
Henry Hill Hickman writes a letter to T. A. Knight describing his experiments with painless surgery on animals using carbon dioxide as an anaesthetic. -
Dr Jules Cloquet
Dr Jules Cloquet amputates a breast from a woman asleep under hypnosis. -
Chloroform is first prepared.
Chloroform is first prepared. -
Crawford Long
Crawford Long administers ether for the removal of a tumour from the neck of a Mr James M. Venable, in what is the first known administration of a gas for surgical pain relief. However, Long did not publish an account of this until December 1849, when it appeared in the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal. -
Bigelow's account
Bigelow's account is published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, launching the spread of ether anaesthesia around the world. -
James Young Simpson
In Edinburgh, Scotland, James Young Simpson introduces chloroform into clinical practice. The patient was Wilhelmina Carstairs, daughter of a physician. -
Waller
Waller describes his chloroform balance at a meeting of the Physiological Society in London. This apparatus was the first to give a continuous and almost instantaneous reading of the concentration of vapor received by the patient. -
British Journal of Anaesthesia
The British Journal of Anaesthesia is founded. The BJA is the second oldest journal of anaesthesia and was the first to be published monthly (in 1955). It became the journal of the College of Anaesthetists in 1990. -
Arno B. Luckhardt
Arno B. Luckhardt administers the first ethylene-oxygen anaesthetic to J.B. Carter, a medical student. The experiment was repeated later the same day with Dr. Luckhardt and Mr. Carter exchanging roles. Since 1918 Luckhardt and R.C. Thompson had extensively studied the anesthetic and analgesic properties of an 80/20 mixture of ethylene and oxygen in animals. Ethylene had been known for more than a century; in the late 1700s Joseph Priestley attributed its first preparation to Jan Ingenhousz, a Du -
First brain tumor operation
First brain tumor operation under local anaesthesia is performed by Dr. K. Winfield Ney at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City . -
epidural needle
The Tuohy epidural needle is introduced into clinical practice. -
First Corretive Heart Surgery
it was created to correct mitral stenosis, a vaule that does not open completely, most patients died. preformed by Dr. Charles Bailey -
Halothane first synthesised.
Halothane first synthesised. -
Intermittent Positive Pressure Ventilation
Intermittent Positive Pressure Ventilation (IPPV) is proposed by Dr Bjorn Ibsen – an anaesthetist working in Denmark during the polio epidemic. Ibsen organising the continuous manual ventilation of patients by students and junior doctors. -
First Open Heart Surgery
performed on a five year old girl who had a hole in her heart -
Heart-Lung Machine
it took over the need to worry about running out of time because of lack of oxygen to the brain. -
Solution To Stop The Heart
a solution was made by Dr. Dennis Melrose that stopped the heart from beating during surgery -
First Heart Transplant
was sucsessful for 18 days until the patient died of pneumonia, preformed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard -
New Heart Surgery to Repair Over Sized Hearts
Dr. Randas Batista developed a new surgery where surgens cut open the heart and take out a section of the left ventricle to help it be able to pump blood more effectively. there have been mixed results from this kind of surgery.
