Editor's Note: Shauna Devine, Ph.D., is a historian of Civil War and American medicine. She has a Ph.D. in medical history and currently holds a joint appointment as a research fellow at the Schulich ...

(Phys.org) —How does consciousness work? Few questions if any could be more profound. One thing we do know about it, jokes biophysicist Luca Turin, is that it is soluble in chloroform. When you put ...

Anesthesia was in its infancy when the American Civil War began. Using case studies of two wounded soldiers, a private and a general, an anesthesiologist reports on its early use. Anesthesia was in ...

The common use of anesthetic agents came of age during the American Civil War, as battlefield medicine translated to civilian use. "Prior to the war, alcoholic drinks, physical restraints, opioid ...

‘On 16th October, the successful and historical ether anesthesia administration by Dr. William T. G. Morgan made it possible to perform surgeries that could sometimes be even lifesaving without ...

"Doctor, will you give me Chloroform or Anesthesia?" This is the often-repeated query by many patients about to undergo an operation. Little do they know that chloroform became obsolete decades ago.

Anesthesia was in its infancy when the American Civil War began in 1861. The sheer number of casualties gave surgeons on both sides the opportunity to gain experience with the first two anesthetic ...

When halothane was introduced as an anesthetic in 1956, it seemed nearly perfect. Unlike ether and cyclopropane, it is both nonflammable and nonexplosive—a valuable asset in the modern operating room ...

Surgery would be inconceivable without general anesthesia, so it may come as a surprise that despite its 175-year history of medical use, doctors and scientists have been unable to explain how ...