Surgery · a Light

What the surgeons used for pain is less than claimed

It is often said that Muslim surgeons invented general anaesthesia. What the sources attest is narrower and worth knowing accurately. Opium, henbane, mandrake and related drugs were given to dull pain and make a patient drowsy, and recipes exist for a sponge soaked in a decoction, dried, then moistened and held under the nose. Recipes of that kind appear in Latin and in Arabic medical writing in overlapping centuries, and which way they travelled is not settled. There is no evidence of measured dosing, of controlled unconsciousness, or of anything a modern anaesthetist would recognise. The surgical texts assume a patient who feels the operation, work to keep it short, and describe assistants holding him still. General anaesthesia arrived in the 1840s with ether, and it was new then.

Arabic and Latin surgery · 9th to 13th centuries