The_Invention_of_Surgery

that wartime medicine has pitted medical greats against each other,
indirect combatants serving their fellow men.
It is a wonder that the inhaled vapors of nitrous oxide, ether, and
chloroform have the effects they do. It is easier to ponder why an opiate
medicine triggers a feeling of euphoria and tranquility when you consider
that an opiate is a mere substitute for our own, endogenous endorphin. The
mechanism of inhalant anesthetics is tougher to consider, as they do not
mimic one of our own chemical molecules. Interestingly, the chemical
behavior of all anesthetics is only recently becoming better understood
and mostly relate to alterations in excitation and inhibition pathways, both
in the brain and in the spinal cord.
The newer anesthetic agents (like isoflurane, desflurane, and
sevoflurane) have rapid onset and reversal, thus making anesthesia much
safer, faster, and with fewer systemic side effects than their predecessors.
As important as they were, ether and chloroform have become historical
relics.
It should be obvious by now that the history of surgery is only recently
a history of cutting, dissecting, sewing, reconstructing, and implanting.
Only in the last 150 years have surgeons been capable of making positive,
and now miraculous transformations for mankind. The revolutions in
printing and peer-review publishing made sharing of breakthroughs
possible, and the advances in chemistry, stoichiometry, and the
understanding of the behavior of gases set the stage for the upheaval of
anesthesia.
Nothing about modern surgery is possible if our forefathers had not
decrypted the complexity of our chemical world and gained dominance
over consciousness. One concern of finding (even primitive) life during an
interplanetary space voyage is finding life that has dissimilar molecular
building blocks and differently evolved chemical receptors, leaving us
vulnerable to life forms that we cannot combat. What if man was an
original animal on planet earth, not having evolved over hundreds of
millions of years and not responsive, or susceptible to the chemicals in our
world? It would be possible that we would have no authority over
sensations and perceptions, and no governance over pain and awareness.
Thankfully, we are a byproduct of every living thing, sharing chemical
structures, molecular receptors, and among mammals, anatomical features