The anaesthesia specialists at State-run Osmania General Hospital (OGH) in Hyderabad celebrated the World Anaesthesia Day, which falls on October 16, in a unique way.
Eschewing the usual practice of holding academic programmes such as continuing medical education, workshops and seminars, the hospital doctors decided to literally turn back the clock by using ether, the pleasant smelling liquid that was first publicly used to demonstrate anaesthesia on October 16, 1846, which is ranked by many as an important event in the history of evolution of medical technology.
The World Anaesthesia Day is observed to mark the anniversary of the first public use of ether anaesthesia by Dr. William T. G. Morton, a US dentist in 1846 on October 16. The dentist used ether to demonstrate that it can be used for painless dental treatments and was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is attached to Harvard School of Medicine.
Subsequent research on medicine lead to the replacement of ether by nitrous oxide, most widely used anaesthetics . “These days nobody uses ether, but we thought it would be fitting to Dr. Morton and his achievement to use it once again albeit in a limited way,” said Superintendent, OGH and Head of Anaesthesia, Dr. C.G. Raghuram.
