ABSTRACT
Inhalation anaesthesia entered British surgical practice on a wave of enthusiasm. The use of ether in 1846, and chloroform in the following year, was greeted by contemporaries, and has since been ratified by historians, as a revolutionary innovation. It was, according to one commentator writing only a few months after ether's debut in the operating theatre, “one of the most remarkable events in the history of medicine”. 2 For its admirers, anaesthesia quickly acquired a synechdotal relationship to modern, civilized treatment, a connection relentlessly pressed by its leading British advocate, James Simpson. For Simpson, the use of anaesthesia in surgery represented a liberation from unnecessary cruelty, one that coincided with the humanitarian spirit of the age. Anaesthesia joined with contemporaneous campaigns—those against slavery and corporal punishment, for example—as harbingers of a coming moral order free from subjugation and suffering. 3 Its first promise, of course, was to free patients from the “sickening horrors” of surgical pain. But anaesthesia also released surgeons from their former unnatural and invidious position of having, in Simpson's words, to “inflict present suffering upon {their} patients, with a prospective view to their own ultimate benefit and advantage”. 4
