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 ...

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 ...

The use of the anesthetic agents ether and chloroform was first described in the 1840s by American physicians Crawford Long, William Morton, William Edward Clarke and James Simpson, but anesthesia was ...