Today, some thoughts about pain and priority. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Creative people don't look
very nice when they're fighting over credit for
their ideas -- especially when they're fighting
about ideas that serve such a basic human need as
avoiding pain.
A hundred and fifty years ago a good surgeon was
defined by his speed as much as anything. A leg
amputation, for example, was excruciatingly
painful, as long as it lasted. A good surgeon
finished the amputation itself in less than a
minute. People tried everything from alcohol and
opium to biting bullets and hypnotism to stem the
pain. But nothing really worked.
The new science of chemistry was producing
substances that could knock a person out; but we
were slow to make the connection. Ether had been
around -- 18th-century party-goers were known to
seal themselves in a room with an open bowl of
ether until the first people went from merely high
to unconscious.
But not until 1842 did a Georgia surgeon named
Crawford Long start using ether in his operations,
and he didn't publish the technique until much
later. In 1844, Horace Wells, a Boston dentist,
recommended using nitrous oxide. He let his own
tooth be extracted to prove the point. Two years
later, another Boston dentist, William Morton, made
two public demonstrations of ether. First he put a
patient under and pulled his tooth. Then he
prepared a second patient for an operation by a
well-known, but skeptical, surgeon. Afterward, the
surgeon allowed that ether was, in fact, "no
humbug."
So Morton patented ether as an anesthetic, and that
started a vicious legal fight. Wells finally
committed suicide over the whole business. In the
meantime, many conservatives -- presumably ones who
weren't going into surgery -- opposed anesthetics
on a variety of grounds. Anesthesia didn't gain
acceptance until Queen Victoria took chloroform for
the birth of her eighth child in 1853.
In retrospect, we see that none of these people
invented anesthesia. It was pretty clear by the
1840s that several chemicals would knock a person
out. The scientific literature shows that many
people were thinking about using chemicals to dodge
pain. But anesthesia had to wait for medical people
to set up the means for using it and for breaking
down public disbelief.
Still, I do like Crawford Long. He was the first to
use ether, and he gave little thought to credit. On
the other hand, it finally took Morton's
showmanship to show surgeons that they really could
end the terrible pain they had to inflict.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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