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Book Reviews
| Stephanie J. Snow, Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). ISBN 978-0-19-280586-7. 220 pp.
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| In her latest work, Blessed Days of Anaesthesia, historian Stephanie Snow builds on her previous academic publications to bring the history of anaesthesia to a general audience. Snow's immensely readable book traces the early life of inhalation anaesthesia through its emergence from scientific experiments in the late–eighteenth century, to its application in surgery in the mid–nineteenth century, and the subsequent developments of general and local anaesthesia into the twentieth century. |
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The first public demonstration of inhalation anaesthesia, using ether, took place at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on 19 October 1846. Though medical and nonmedical practitioners had experimented with ether and nitrous oxide in the years prior to this event, it was this public demonstration that caught the imagination of the medical community and the general public, initiating one of the greatest changes in medical understanding and practice of the nineteenth century. For medicine, the nineteenth century was an era of dramatic change, from the new theories and practices of antisepsis and asepsis, to increased government regulation of the training and practices of the medical profession. While Snow places anaesthesia within this context of medical change, she gives equal significance to humanitarian and social changes that took place in the nineteenth century, and the complex role anaesthesia played in such changes, as it challenged the meaning and purpose of pain in Victorian society. |
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The field of accessible, broad-ranging histories of anaesthesia is surprisingly large, drawing contributions from both physicians and historians. Some works in this field are sweeping surveys of the emergence of a new medical technology, while others focus more closely on single incidents, usually various 'firsts' in anaesthesia. While Snow's work follows a loosely chronological structure, her chapters are organised thematically, which serves her purpose of examining the social and cultural impact of anaesthesia in Victorian society, as well as the medical impact of the new technology. Snow's attention to context and to the reception of anaesthesia by the patients, not only the practitioners, is refreshing and makes this work superior to others in this field. |
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The greater part of Snow's study concentrates on the nineteenth century, focusing on the two most widely used anaesthetic agents, ether and chloroform. Most of the early experimentation, development, and controversy surrounding inhalation anaesthesia occurred in the United States and the United Kingdom, and these two countries comprise the main spheres of action in this book. The author does however attempt to position anaesthesia in a more global context, particularly in relation to anaesthetic developments in Europe and the place of anaesthesia in Britain's imperial project. |
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Snow explores anaesthesia in action in dental, surgical, and obstetric practices. She devotes particular attention to the complex arguments and discussion that surrounded the application of anaesthesia to childbirth in the second half of the nineteenth century. After a chapter examining issues relating to anaesthesia, femininity, and childbirth, Snow then turns to arguments of physiology and masculinity that surrounded the application of anaesthesia in war, where she focuses particularly on the Crimean War and the American Civil War, the first wars in which anaesthesia was used to treat soldiers on the battlefield. Snow then turns to the fear and paranoia that surrounded inhalation anaesthesia (particularly chloroform, the most potent anaesthetic of the mid– to late–nineteenth century) and its use in crime. Fears were aroused both in medical situations, where doctors were accused of taking advantage of unconscious patients, and more mundane situations, where a respectable gentleman might be accosted while walking down the street and be rendered insensible by a ruffian with chloroform and a hanky. |
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This book is rich with anecdotes, from author and playwright Fanny Burney's excruciating mastectomy in 1810 before the introduction of anaesthesia, to the giddy relief expressed by Queen Victoria on receiving chloroform to ease the pains of labour during the births of two of her children. Such vignettes help to transport the reader to a past where pain was an inevitable fact of existence, and then dramatically challenged by the new anaesthetic technologies. This book offers a valuable contribution to the field of history of anaesthesia accessible to the general reader. It will fulfil any reader with an interest in the Victorian period, or the history of medicine, science, and technology. |
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| ELIZABETH TODD
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| UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY |
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