ABSTRACT
Anaesthesia, as we know it today, was first successfully demonstrated by William Morton, a local dentist, at the Massachusetts General Hospital Boston, USA on 16th October 1846 when he administered ether to Gilbert Abbot for operation on a vascular tumour on his neck. Earlier Horace Wells had successfully used nitrous oxide in 1844 for painless extraction of teeth. Simpson at Edinburgh University overcame some of the technical difficulties of ether administration by introducing chloroform. The benefits of anaesthesia were then universally recognised and antagonism by religious leaders was countered when Queen Victoria accepted chloroform from John Snow during the birth of Prince Leopold in 1853.
