Anesthetics

Before modern anesthesia, surgery was an agonizing ordeal, and physicians had little recourse but to rely on crude methods to dull pain. This volume chronicles the long quest to relieve surgical suffering, from ancient herbal sedatives to the development of inhalational agents and sophisticated delivery systems. It also weighs the successes and hazards of various anesthetic drugs, and explains how these advances reshaped the operating room into a safer space for life-saving procedures. The account provides a clear overview of how anesthesia evolved from a desperate experiment into an essential component of modern medicine.