page_title: History of surgery
section_title: Anesthesia
hierarchical_section_title: History of surgery / Modern surgery / Anesthesia
context_page_description: Surgery is the branch of medicine that deals with the physical manipulation of a bodily structure to diagnose, prevent, or cure an ailment. Ambroise Paré, a 16th-century French surgeon, stated that to perform surgery is, "To eliminate that which is superfluous, restore that which has been dislocated, separate that which has been united, join that which has been divided and repair the defects of nature."
  Since humans first learned to make and handle tools, they have employed their talents to develop surgical techniques, each time more sophisticated than the last; however, until the industrial revolution, surgeons were incapable of overcoming the three principal obstacles which had plagued the medical profession from its infancy — bleeding, pain and infection. Advances in these fields have transformed surgery from a risky "art" into a scientific discipline capable of treating many diseases and conditions.
context_section_description: Modern pain control through anesthesia was discovered in the mid-19th century. Before the advent of anesthesia, surgery was a traumatically painful procedure and surgeons were encouraged to be as swift as possible to minimize patient suffering.  This also meant that operations were largely restricted to amputations and external growth removals.
  Beginning in the 1840s, surgery began to change dramatically in character with the discovery of effective and practical anaesthetic chemicals such as ether, first used by the American surgeon Crawford Long (1815–1878), and chloroform, discovered by James Young Simpson (1811–1870) and later pioneered in England by John Snow (1813–1858), physician to Queen Victoria, who in 1853 administered chloroform to her during childbirth, and in 1854 disproved the miasma theory of contagion by tracing a cholera outbreak in London to an infected water pump. In addition to relieving patient suffering, anaesthesia allowed more intricate operations in the internal regions of the human body.  In addition, the discovery of muscle relaxants such as curare allowed for safer applications.  American surgeon J. Marion Sims (1813–83) received credit for helping found Gynecology, but later was criticized for failing to use anesthesia on African test subjects.
caption: Crawford Long (1815–1878)
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