Theodoric of Lucca, Italian physician and bishop, dies.  He had used sponges soaked with opium and mandragora for surgical pain relief.

Franz Anton Mesmer is born. He later received a grant from Louis XVI to study the magnetic influence of the stars on human beings.  In his Memoire sur la decouverte du magnetisme animal (publ 1779) he described using magnets and hypnosis to cure various ailments.  'Mesmerism' was widely used for surgical pain relief prior to the introduction of anaesthesia.

Thomas Beddoes is born.

Beddoes began to explore the potential medical uses of gases in  the late 1780s.  He was assisted by  none other than James Watt, who developed  some equipment for Beddoes' use.

In 1798 Beddoes founded the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol, England, where  Humphrey Davy did his nitrous oxide research.  He died on 24th December 1808.

Peter Mark Roget is born.  After graduating from medical school in Edinburgh he  worked with  Thomas Beddoes and Humphrey Davy on their famous nitrous  oxide research. 

Roget wrote the encylopaedia Brittanica entry on Beddoes and near the end of his life created his eponymous thesaurus.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier  is beheaded in the early days of the French Revolution. It was Lavoisier who had discovered oxygen.  It is said that he had told  his friends that he would start blinking as the guillotine blade fell and  they were to to see how long his eyes carried on blinked after his head was severed.  The result was some 15 seconds!

Humphrey Davy completes the introduction to his classic work, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical: Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration.

Crawford W. Long is born in Danielsville, Georgia

Henry Hill Hickman writes a letter to T. A. Knight describing his experiments with painless surgery on animals using carbon dioxide as an anaesthetic

Rochester, New York.   Physician William E. Clarke administers ether from a towel to a Miss Hobbie prior to the removal of a tooth by dentist Elijah Pope.

Crawford Long, a physician in rural Georgia, administers ether for the removal of a tumour from the neck of a Mr James M. Venable, in what is the first known administration of a gas for surgical pain relief.  However, Long did not publish an account of this until 1849.

German physician Heinrich Irenaeus Quincke is born.  He was the first to discover the technique of lumbar puncture.

William T. G. Morton begins using sulphuric ether as a local anaesthetic agent in his Boston Dental practice.  This had been suggested to him by Dr Charles A. Jackson.

Dentist Horace Wells attends a demonstration of nitrous oxide inhalation at Union Hall in Hartford, Conneticut.  At this exhibition by Gardner Quincy Colton, Wells conceived the notion of pain relief by gas inhalation, and thus rediscovered an idea by Humphrey Davy expressed 4 decades earlier.  However, Wells quickly put the idea into practice.  Later in the century Colton single-handedly revived interest in nitrous oxide for dentistry

December 11             

Colton administers nitrous oxide to Wells while another dentist, Dr. John M. Riggs, extracted one of Well's teeth.

Horace Wells attempts to demonstrate anaesthetic properties of nitrous oxide at     Massachussetts General Hospital.  The anaesthetic was incomplete and judged a failure.

Boston dentist William Thomas Green Morton anaesthetized his patient Eben H. Frost and successfully removed an ulcerated tooth.  Frost had requested that Morton mesmerize (hypnotize) him, but the dentist, who had been searching for a pain  relieving agent, tried sulfuric ether instead. 

 On this Friday morning,  William  Morton appeared in the operating  theatre of the Massachussetts General Hospital.  Morton was running late, but surgeon John Collins Warren had not yet started the removal of a tumour from Gilbert Abbot's jaw.  For about 3  minutes Abbot breathed ether vapour from Morton's simple apparatus - which had been the source of his delay .As Warren noted later, Abbott  'sank into a state of insensibility' .  The first  public  demonstration of ether anaesthesia had begun and proved successful.  Abbot "did not experience any pain at the time, although aware that the operation was          proceeding" Warren wrote in his 1848 account of the event.  The great surgeon is supposed to have declared "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." 

At the MGH surgeon George Hayward removes a large tumour from a woman's arm in the second successful demonstration of Morton's 'Letheon'

Surgeon General George Hayward performed a leg amputation and a lower jaw removal under ether anaesthesia at the Massachussetts General Hospital.  These surgeries were the 3rd and 4th at  which the Boston dentist William Thomas Green Morton served as anaesthetist.

Henry J. Bigelow, junior surgeon at the Massachussetts General Hospital reported on Morton's 4 successful ether anaesthetics to a meeting of the Boston Society for Medical Improvments.

Letter patent No. 4848 issued to Charles T. Jackson and William T. G. Morton for 10% of all profits on the use of ether in surgical operations.  There was vociferous opposition from the medical and dental communities to such a patent so that Jackson and Morton quickly made their discovery known and freely available

Bigelow's account is published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, launching the spread of ether anaesthesia around the world.

In a letter to William T. G. Morton, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests the word 'anaesthesia' to describe the mental state produced by the inhalation of the ether vapour.  The word had first appeared in Bailey's English Dictionary in 1751

English dentist James Robinson administered ether for removal of a disease molar tooth from a young female patient in London.  John Snow visited Robinson within a few days to see the process at first hand. Also ether is used for anaesthesia during the amputation of a leg in Dumfries, Scotland.

The first surgical anaesthetic with ether is administered in England by Robert Liston.

 In Edinburgh, Scotland, James Young Simpson introduced chloroform into clinical practice.  The patient was Wilhelmina Carstairs, daughter of a physician.

Hannah Greener from Newcastle, England became the first fatality from chloroform anaesthesia to be widely reported in the literature.

John Snow administers chloroform to Queen Victoria for the birth of Prince Leopold.  She later wrote in her journal  "Dr Snow gave that blessed chloroform and the effect was soothing, uieting and delightful beyond measure".  This event removed much of the stigma then associated with pain relief in childbirth in Great Britain.

Dr Edmund Andrews publishes in the Chicago Medical Examiner a paper proposing           administration of nitrous oxide with oxygen in a premixed combination of 20 - 80%

A committee formed in April by the Odontological Society of Great Britain and the Committee of Management of the Dental Hospital of London to investigate nitrous oxide makes its first report.  The report recommended the elimination of air inhalation during nitrous oxide administration but also emphasizes the potential dangers of this method.

 A colleague of Dr. Carl Koller's reports to the Heidelberg Congress of Ophthalmology Koller's first use of cocaine as a local anaesthetic

Vassily von Anrep publishes first extensive account of the clinical use of cocaine in a Russian  journal.

German surgeon Dr August Bier administers the first spinal anaesthetic.  He also invent the spiked German army helmet used during the first world war.

Bayer Company introduces heroin, first synthesized from morphine in 1874, for use as a non-addictive painkiller.  It was later found to be more addictive than morphine and the company removed it from the market.

American surgeon William Stewart Halstead dies.  He was one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Medical School.  Under his direction the first pair of rubber surgical gloves were made.  He was also one of the first American surgeons to research the use of cocaine as a local anaesthetic.  Unfortunately his self-experimentation resulted in addiction to the drug.