Have you ever imagined what it would be like to have surgery with no anaesthesia ?
Well , if you were alive before 1846 , you didn ’ t have to ; one had to be awake all through excruciatingly painful operations . The ability to have ‘ control ’ over pain felt by the body during surgery was ground-breaking for the medical world . Its impact is felt today with anaesthesia being used in operations from tooth removal to childbirth .
The 5th National Audit project took a survey back in 2014 among participating NHS hospitals . It showed that over 2 days , 76.9 % of patients were put under general anaesthesia in the UK alone – that ’ s 2,766,600 people ! Since it plays such a fundamental role in our health care industry , it seems only fair we know more about it . So , if you ' ve ever wondered how anaesthesia was first discovered or what compound was used in the first pain-free surgery , here ’ s what you need to know :
One of the earliest forms of pain relief was first referenced in 3400 B . C . If you felt pain , you were given the juice of a white poppy mixed with nettle seeds . Although it sounds a little strange , its success was undeniable . For centuries to come , poppies were used as the primary source of pain relief . It was in the 1800s when the scientific world really took off , with scientists making more ground-breaking discoveries than ever before . One of these great scientists was a chemist , a German man named Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Serturner . He was the first person to discover and isolate the substance in poppies that gave them their ‘ pain-relieving ’ properties , morphine . The race to eliminate pain was on .
By Olga Guryanova