The development of anesthesia was rather meant to create a cultural change. The concept of pain was mostly linked to the obstetric pain during the eighteenth century. One was regarded highly if he or she was able to endure the pain and men who disregarded pain were favored the most. Gradually, a change took place when the idea of anesthetics was favored, which would change the cultural environment of a number of individuals in Western Europe and the Americas.

They were dentists, not doctors, who are credited for discovering anesthesia because they had better everyday contacts with patients dealing with tremendous amounts of pain. On the other hand doctors were more attentive on the rising of new infectious diseases and such, rather than pain from treatments or procedures. Horace Well and William Thomas Green Morton were the two dentists known to develop anesthesia, or better known as local anesthesia, from a very peculiar Spanish discovered crop, the coca leaf.

Coca leaf is best known today for its extraction to make the drug cocaine, which is used in various ways in modern times. It was from coca leaf that several chemists in Germany synthesized cocaine, with which the first motives of anesthesia were encountered. Friedrich Gaedeke was the German chemist, who discovered that coca leaves contained a molecule known as alkaloid. Then, Albert Niemann isolated the substance and called it cocaine. Cocaine was used and studied first by Thomas Moreno y Maiz, a Peruvian surgeon, who found out that injecting this drug in rats, pigs, and frogs caused sensitivity in them; hence, caused some local anesthetic effects. Another observance with cocaine was led by a Russian physician, Basil Von Anrep. He injected a small quantity of cocaine under his skin and felt nothing when jabbing took place at that very site of the skin. Consequently, he did the same to his tongue and felt no sensation when the tongue was jabbed the same way. Therefore, he concluded that cocaine was a good candidate for surgical anesthetics. Finally, it was only after the experiments and researched work of ophthalmologist Carl Koller from Vienna that cocaine would definitely be named to use as regional and local anesthesia. Dr. Koller’s work and research was based on a patient who had glaucoma, who would be the first person to have a local anesthetic on an operating table. The development of cocaine as anesthesia spread across United States and Canada during the late nineteenth century.

Soon thereafter, Dr. Richard John Hall reported on the first successful nerve block of a patient who was under the supplement of cocaine hydrochloride. It was him, Dr. Hall and Dr. William Stewart Halsted who are credited for using the hypodermic syringe to infiltrate cocaine to the sensory nerve. The development of the hypodermic syringe would further enhance local anesthesia. It was an instrument carefully described to administer substances into the human body, subcutaneously. More and more elaborate designs of the syringe were being brought by new innovators. It is Alexander Wood, a surgeon from Edinburg, who we credit today for “employing the needle and the syringe as a medical instrument.” Eventually, medical professionals witnessed the development of Pravaz’s syringe, named after Charles Gabriel Pravaz, known as the “father of orthopedics.” Pravaz’s syringe was the most advanced syringe, which drove more health professionals to the use of local anesthesia due to its mechanism with the fine needle and the screw motion that allows a convenient way to apply substances into the body.

Calatayud, J. & Gonzalez, A. (2003). History of the Development and Evolution of Local Anesthesia since the Coca Leaf. Anesthesiology, 98, 1503-1508.