Comfortably Numb
Anesthetics are slowly giving up the secrets of how they work
By John Travis
Take a stroll through the Boston Public Garden, the nation’s oldest botanical garden, and you’ll find an array of plaques, monuments, and memorials honoring famous people of history. Not far from a statue of George Washington on horseback, there’s a tall monument that honors not a person, but a chemical. This tribute to ether is probably the world’s only monument to a drug. A statue representing the Good Samaritan tops the structure, which displays the inscription, “There shall be no more pain.”
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Erected in the 19th century, the tribute commemorates ether’s first use as a surgical general anesthetic, which took place in 1846 at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Today, it’s hard to imagine what surgery was like before this discovery and the subsequent development of inhaled and injected chemicals that are even more effective in rendering people unconscious and insensitive to pain.