19th Century Anesthesia and the Politics of Pain
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce once called the nineteenth century the “Age of Pain.†He was referring to the dispiriting uptick in suicides and nervous collapses during the Gilded Age, but he could just as well have been describing earlier decades in the century when surgeries were still performed without the aid of anesthesia. Pain was ubiquitous during this period; even toothaches achieved a philosophical weight.
The first professional implementation of anesthesia was performed by a dentist searching for a way to ease the discomfort of tooth extraction. In 1846, William G. T. Morton successfully used ether as an anesthetic during a surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. The patient writhed and yelled on the table, but, according to literature and medicine scholar Stephanie Browner, “later reported that he had suffered no pain, only an awareness of a ‘blunt instrument passed roughly across his neck.’†Only a few years later, medical societies across the United States and Europe had embraced anesthesia.
https://daily.jstor.org/19th-century-anesthesia-and-the-politics-of-pain/
