00:00
So this is a painting of that first event,
and this is from 1845 at the Massachusetts
General. This operating room
is still in existence, and you can visit it if you wish,
but you can see how very different the world was then
than it is now. All these people gathered around
the operating room table wearing street clothes.
00:21
They may in fact be people right off the street,
because like public executions,
surgery was a popular spectator sport
in the mid part of the 19 century.
00:33
You can see Wells, excuse me,
Morton holding his
bottle of ether and the surgeon working
on the young man's neck. So that started
general anesthesia for general surgery.
But it was important to move beyond that to other
areas of need. And the area that was likely
to be missed in all of this was obstetrical
anesthesia. Partly, this was due to the biases
of the era that said, you know: pain
during labour was a required part
of woman's recompense for original
sin. Well, there was a very powerful
lady in existence in that era
in Great Britain. That was Queen Victoria, and she wasn't willing
to be punished for something that might have happened
in the garden of Eden. And with her 8th child,
she had eleven I believe, she asked
Doctor John Snow, who was the first
practicing anesthesiologist in Great Britain,
to provide her with anesthesia. Snow's an interesting man.
And for those of you who are aware
of the London pump cholera story,
he was the same John Snow
who discovered that pump and was able
to prevent cholera from spreading
in London. And so, in a way, he's the father of epidemiology
and he's also one of the fathers of anesthesiology.
01:57
Very amazing man. Anyway, after she delivered
her baby, Queen Victoria said:
"Doctor Snow gave the blessed chloroform,
and the effect was soothing, quieting
and delightful beyond measure. And from that moment
forward, obstetrical anesthesia
had a solid place in medicine.
So this is what it looked like to start with.
02:21
This is a bottle of ether and a Schimmelbusch mask.
And that mask is basically
just a wire mask that you laid some gauze over
and you pour ether directly on the gauze
and put the mask and gauze over the patient's
face and they breathe the vapour.
02:39
This is a modern Anesthetic machine,
a little bit fancier than the Schimmelbusch mask.
02:45
Much more sophisticated, full of very complex
warning systems and monitoring systems,
which we will discuss in more detail
in a later lecture.