Science File -

The ancient Egyptians left behind several treatises on surgery and medicine, spanning hundreds of years. A wall scene at Saqqara depicts the physician Ankh-Mahor (6th Dynasty, 2345-2183 BCE) treating two men who are undergoing some form of surgery or manipulation; the accompanying text reads "do not let it be painful", suggesting the possibility that some form of anaesthesia could have been applied before carrying out the procedure. Patients could be sedated with opium, a discovery also attributed to the Chinese. Inhalation anaesthesia was also (allegedly) known, where water was mixed with vinegar over Memphite stone, resulting in the formation of carbon dioxide with its known sedative effect.² There is a Babylonian recipe, surviving on a clay tablet from c. 2250 BCE, for toothache, using henbane (Hyoscyamus spp.) seeds. The great Hindu surgeon Susruta (possibly fl.1000 BCE) recommends the use of wine as anesthetic before surgery. When practising suttee, it was often a humane measure to stupefy the widow with hashish before lighting the pyre, a precaution also reputedly carried out by the Arabs when a prisoner was awaiting execution. Homer, assumed to be writing during the 8^th century BCE, employs a term, nepenthe, in the fourth book of the Odyssey; literally, it means "the one that chases away sorrow". Nepenthes pharmakon (i.e. a liquid that chases away sorrow) is a magical potion given to Helen of Troy by an Egyptian queen; it has been claimed that this represents an opiate preparation, or possibly one involving cannabis.

Descriptions of anaesthesia and anaesthetic agents are notably absent from most of the surgical treatises that have survived; but then such descriptions would be missing from a modern surgical text, as well. The surgeon is concerned only with what is directly under the scalpel, and s/he tends to think about anaesthesia only when s/he needs co-operation, or at least not open revolt, from the patient.