World Anesthesia Day
October 16th is World Anesthesia Day - 175 years ago on Oct 16 1846 in the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital William TG Morton first demonstrated the successful use of ether to painlessly remove a neck tumor.
The New England Journal of Medicine voted the discovery of anesthesia as the most important breakthrough in medicine in the last 200 years and what a miracle it still is.
The advent of anesthesia has changed the world and saved billions of lives. it allowed the acceleration and improvement of surgical care by leaps and bounds. As surgeons, we do not take our anesthesia colleagues for granted. We are thankful for their skill and expertise every day. They take great care of our patients and protect them through the stress of surgery.
Can you imagine a time when every breast cancer was fatal? That if you broke your femur you just laid in bed until it healed? Or you died. Where we had no cure for infections or tumors or so many other things that surgery has cured. Surgeons and anesthesiologists are inextricably linked and together we have done more for humanity than all of the medical advances that came before us.