[Victory over surgical pain : 170 years ago the era of modern anesthesia began - but what happened in the operating theater in the time before?].

170 years ago, on 6 October 1846, the dentist William Thomas Green Morton, sucessfully demonstrated ether anesthesia in a patient undergoing surgery in the operating theater of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He thereby put an end to the unthinkable suffering of patients who had to undergo surgery when fully conscious. Before this "discovery" surgical procedures resembled a battle for life and death. Only a few documents exist illustrating the attitude of surgeons concerning their actions and which tortures patients had to tolerate. One of the first German standard operating procedures for the perioperative period was formulated in 1812 by Christian Bonifacius Zang. In her diaries and letters, the english novelist Frances Burney described her mastectomy without anesthesia on 30 September 1811. The Scottish physician and novelist John Brown, in his story of "Rab and his friends", painted a picture of the mastectomy of Ailie Noble by the famous Scottish surgeon James Syme in 1833, also without anesthesia. Finally, in his letters the Scottish scientist George Wilson described the amputation of his left foot at the ankle in January 1843, again by James Syme and again without the use of anesthesia.