1930's Medicine and Health | The "Good Sleep"—A Ne W Era In Surgery

News Flashes.

In 1933 Americans could ponder such news flashes from the world of "astonishing, modern surgery" as:

• A patient in a New York hospital who read a newspaper throughout his painless operation.
• A seventy-year-old surgeon who performed a major abdominal operation upon himself.
• A Long Island patient who carried on a conversation with the surgeon during a forty-five-minute operation on his brain.

Anesthesia and Medical Progress.

One of the most significant American contributions to the history of medical progress was the introduction of surgical anesthesia. In 1844 Horace Wells, a dentist from Hartford, Connecticut, began to use nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") during dental extractions. Two years later another dentist, William T. G. Morton of Boston, who had experimented with ether for pulling teeth, administered it for a surgical operation performed by John C. Warren at...