WI earlier anesthetics?

Magnificate

While reading an article about history of medicine I noticed that effective anesthetics were introduced quite late. Suppose we stimulate the development of medical science by:
- Earlier ether synthesizing.
- Earlier/wider use of salicylate (willow leaves).
I have no medical education, but I think both of those inventions could have been made about a century earlier than OTL. What would the consequences be?
 

Adamanteus

Magnificate said:
While reading an article about history of medicine I noticed that effective anesthetics were introduced quite late. Suppose we stimulate the development of medical science by:
- Earlier ether synthesizing.
- Earlier/wider use of salicylate (willow leaves).
I have no medical education, but I think both of those inventions could have been made about a century earlier than OTL. What would the consequences be?
Click to expand...

You don't even need to do either. Opium was traditionally used as an anesthetic, and there are reports of surgery being performed as early as the secondary century AD using it. The problem isn't anesthesia, but surgical technique and medical knowledge.
 

robertp6165

Adamanteus said:
You don't even need to do either. Opium was traditionally used as an anesthetic, and there are reports of surgery being performed as early as the secondary century AD using it. The problem isn't anesthesia, but surgical technique and medical knowledge.
Click to expand...

The increases in surgical technique and medical knowledge which took place in the latter 19th and throughout the 20th centuries, took place because of the development of anasthetics such as ether and chloroform. Opium is not a substitute for these. Opium does not render one totally unconscious without severe danger of a lethal overdose, and major operations cannot be safely performed if the patient is awake and moving about.

Prior to the development of ether and chloroform, operations had to be performed quickly, because the patient was either not anesthetized or because an inferior anasthetic (whiskey or opium) was being used which would not totally prevent them from struggling during the operation. About all you could do safely was amputations, and a few other relatively minor procedures which could be performed while the patient was awake and struggling.

If ether and chloroform are discovered a century earlier, however, doctors from the early 18th century onward will have the luxury of performing longer and more intricate operations. While the lack of the germ theory of disease will of course lead to many deaths from infection due to unsanitary operating conditions, nevertheless, the very fact that doctors can now attempt these operations will add to overall medical knowledge and improvements in surgical technique. When the germ theory does come about, leading to the use of sterile surgical tools in the late 19th century, these increased surgical skills will lead to a much higher survival rate for patients than occurred in OTL. This could have dramatic impacts, which can only be guessed at.
 

The Mists Of Time

Surgery and medical techniques would be about 100 years more advanced than in OTL. Many of the developments in that field came after the invention of anesthesia, so we would be moving the time of routine use of anesthesia back to sometime in the mid to late 1700's.

Another major problem wasn't anesthesia and surviving the surgery itself. The problem was infection setting in after the surgery. So you also need to have an understanding of germs, the development of antiseptics, and of some sort of what we today would call sterile techniques also moved back about 100 years earlier than in OTL.

I have often thought they may have had some knowledge of such things in ancient times but that knowledge was lost to us.

In medicine as in other sciences most terms are in or from Latin, except the term "ostomy" as in "colostomy." The word ostomy comes from Ancient Greek and means "mouth" or "opening." The reason it is in Greek is that The Ancient Greeks were supposedly opening the abdominal cavity, removing a cancerous section of bowel, and then creating a colostomy, and doing so sucessfully and routinely as far back as a couple of hundred years BC. Wonder what they used for anesthesia and antiseptics? Can't imagine such surgery without anesthesia. The Ancient Greeks even successfully removed brain tumors. I understand that's how the disease cancer got named. They noticed how the tumors seemed to have sprouted legs (feelers) and the removed tumor reminded them of a crab, like the constellation Cancer The Crab, and that's how the disease cancer got named.
 

Berra

The Mists Of Time said:
Surgery and medical techniques would be about 100 years more advanced than in OTL. .
Click to expand...

Not nessesary. A lot of other important inventions wouldnt be affected. X-rays for example.

I also tried hard but I couldn't keep myself. How would it affect the 7 foot female surgeons. ;)
 

carlton_bach

I think ether sounds like the most likely candidate. It's not too difficult to make, and it's brute-force enough to make accidental observation possible.

As others pointed out, having that just means medicine runs smack into the next barrier to effective surgery, infections. But interestingly, there's a reasonable chance that around the Renaissance - about the same time that ether was first synthesised and found to be useless - when medical science began considering fermentation as a major proscess in bodily functions and dietetics. That could lead to a theoretical explanation of infection as a 'fermentation process' (see how it seems to be exacerbated by contact with decomposing flesh) and therefore consider all 'fermentative matter' anathema around surgery. Keeping dead bodies, flesh, blood, fecal matter, urine, dirt, dairy products, insects (a product of fermentation-like 'prime generation) and alcohol away from patients could go quite some way to more successful operations.
 

Adamanteus

Max Sinister said:
The side effects of opium make it dangerous to use, though.
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That's not true, actually. Opioids are actually safer to use than ethers or halogenated anesthetics.

robertp6165 said:
The increases in surgical technique and medical knowledge which took place in the latter 19th and throughout the 20th centuries, took place because of the development of anasthetics such as ether and chloroform. Opium is not a substitute for these. Opium does not render one totally unconscious without severe danger of a lethal overdose, and major operations cannot be safely performed if the patient is awake and moving about.
Click to expand...

I disagree. There have been effective anesthetics even in ancient times. Although ancient knowledge of anesthesia was nowhere as good as today, it would not have prevented its use. Opium is actually a very effective anesthetic, and safer than many others. It is also a pain reliever so the patient is unlikely to move in response to the surgery. Although the anesthetic dose of opium is extremely high (compared to the analgesic and euphoric doses), it is difficult to cause death by opium alone. This subtlety may not have been apparent in ancient times.

Surgery was being performed even in ancient times, even without anesthesia at all. Effective anesthesia only allowed surgery to be performed as a routine, rather than in emergencies. First of all, complete knowledge of anatomy didn't even exist until the Renaissance, because of a taboo against dissection. Second, understanding of physiology was grossly lacking until even the 20th century. For example, until the 18th century, there was no understanding that veins and arteries carried blood in different directions. There was also the danger of infection, which even the ancients understood was a risk, but had no idea that it happened due to hygiene. In the face of this, there were frequent misshaps and this served to detract doctors from performing surgery at all.
 

carlton_bach

Susano said:
*laughs*

waz abou akcohol, eh? :D
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Many doctors will be able to tell you that at the point someone actually passes out from alcohol (as opposed to falls asleep), he's got a good chance not to wake up again. Ether attacks the right connections much more effectively than alcohol or opium.

Of course, you could anesthesize people effectively with other means, but I am not sure how well the dosing requirements were understood. Ether was dangerous, but people got the point fairly quickly.
 

Max Sinister

Banned
When did they start to use it for operations? It certainly has some disadvantages (it can burn, makes people nauseous, and others), but wouldn't it still be better than no operations at all?
 

carlton_bach

Max Sinister said:
When did they start to use it for operations? It certainly has some disadvantages (it can burn, makes people nauseous, and others), but wouldn't it still be better than no operations at all?
Click to expand...

It seems people didn't make the connection. Laughing gas was around for quite a while until anyone noticed it could act as a painkiller. IIRC ether was synthesised in some kind of alchemical procedure involving sulphur. It's not exactly intuitive for someone to try what happens if he breathes it in.

As in so many cases it looks that this invention was lying around waiting for people with the right mindset.
 
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