The drugs and mechanisms of general anesthesia

"Gentlemen, this is no humbug,” the surgeon John Warren is said to have declared to the audience at Massachusetts General Hospital after William Morton’s first successful demonstration of general anesthesia on October 16th, 1846.1 Before then, surgery was a miserable experience for both patient and surgeon. The term anesthesia – literally meaning “without sensation” – was first used by the ancient Greek surgeon Dioscorides and resurrected by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes after the demonstration at MGH.