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The social historian Dorothy Hartley, talking about our distant ancestors' social attitudes and assumptions: that is, people in general, excluding scholars and philosophers, makes the point "We have no right to distrust their brains because of their beliefs. The fact is, we do not know what they believed." [italics in original]
So when dealing now with the history of anaesthesia (I knew I'd get to the point at last) it is vital to keep this shift of consciousness in mind. It isn't that previous surgeons, physicians and nurses were callous brutes (though some indeed were), nor that their patients were unfeeling clods or too frightened or inarticulate to protest (though some were); it's more that they seem to have regarded the very concept of pain differently. But there can be no doubt of the terror that the prospect of all but the most minor surgical procedures inspired in the patients, and often in the surgeons themselves.
The very word anaesthesia itself has a respectable lineage, but wasn't applied to this speciality until 1846 (by the American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes); it derives from two Greek words άν=not, άϊσθησίς=perception by the senses, and simply means "absence of sensation", crudely, unconsciousness. Distinguish it, please, from analgesia, similarly derived from Greek, but meaning specifically "absence of pain".
The whole idea of a whole perioperative technique, or science, did not exist, at least not until mankind had some reasonable idea of animal anatomy and physiology, particularly as regards nerves and respiration. Relief of pain in general is a huge subject on its own; here, we're going to talk about relief of pain caused by surgical procedures.
Probably the earliest forms of anaesthesia were discovered accidentally, when mankind, having discovered fire, inhaled smoke from some types of burning vegetation with interesting effects. Or when, having kept some fruit a little too long, they discovered that eating it sent you all giggly, and dizzy, so that you might fall over but not realize the hurt until later. The discovery of the body of Oetzi (fl. circa 3300 BCE) has raised a further interesting possibility, because Oetzi bears the scars of a pattern of puncture wounds which have tentatively been identified as acupuncture-like. Possibly pain relief for his (definite) osteo-arthrosis or for some procedure?
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