The Heritage of Anesthesia by Patrick Sim

Abstract

The Heritage of Anesthesia by Patrick Sim presents the history of anesthesia as chronicled through the rare book holdings of the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology (WLM). Consisting of 19 chapters and more than 200 discrete entries, this 450-page annotated bibliography traces the history of this uniquely American contribution to medicine by beginning with the introduction of surgical anesthesia in 1846, and then describing the factors that enabled this initially merely technical exercise to develop and evolve into a medical specialty and profession based on scientific principles (Figures 1 and 2). Our beloved colleague Patrick Pui-Kam Sim, MLS, the Paul M. Wood Distinguished Librarian Emeritus of the Wood LibraryMuseum of Anesthesiology, died on the eve of the American Society of Anesthesiologists 2010 Annual Meeting. Patrick served the WLM with extraordinary expertise, grace, and devotion for 39 years. During the last three decades of his tenure, Patrick meticulously had been compiling an annotated bibliography of the Rare Book Collection of the WLM. This was an enormous undertaking, as Patrick had multiple other responsibilities and virtually no support staff during the first 15 years of his service to the WLM. In addition, compiling the bibliography demanded knowledge not just of history and the English language, but of medicine, science, Chinese, French, German, and Latin as well. However, his book, titled The Heritage of Anesthesia, was unfinished at the time of his death from lung cancer. Realizing that this very necessary scholarly compilation was Patrick’s labor of love, several of us felt compelled to complete Patrick’s work as a tangible expression of the love and admiration he engendered in all of us. A few years before Patrick’s death, Donald Caton, MD, Past President (1997-2001) of the WLM and 2004 Laureate of the History of Anesthesia, and I, in collaboration with WLM Archivist Felicia Reilly and medical editor Pauline Snider, embarked on our mission to complete the annotated bibliography. Among Patrick’s files we found more than 1,100 pages of comprehensive, type-written notes pertaining to the annotated bibliography. These pages contained scholarly details concerning the context and the provenance of the WLM’s priceless books. Remarkably, several of the WLM-held manuscripts predate 1456, the year when the oldest known version of the Gutenberg Bible (the first major book produced on a printing press) appeared. It soon became apparent that organizing this wealth of information would be challenging–and critical. Patrick’s original manuscript was comprised of 27 chapters, and some of the chapters contained repetitious material. Moreover, Patrick had organized the material by subject, regardless of the date of publication of the work. The numbering of his chapters reflected solely the order on which he worked on the assorted topics rather than a specific timeline. With this as background to our organizational conundrum, Don and I initially envisioned rearranging the material in chronological order. Yet, upon further reflection, this approach seemed less than optimal. Had we followed this plan, the introduction of surgical anesthesia would not have appeared until almost the last third of the manuscript! Then Don had an epiphany. He suggested that we begin by featuring the fascinating concatenation of events surrounding the introduction of surgical anesthesia in 1846, clearly a watershed occurrence replete with colorful participants (Table 1). After introducing other methods of surgical anesthesia, we focused on the application of principles of basic science to the clinical practice of anesthesia. Although such luminaries as Andreas Vesalius, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Richard Lower, and Antoine Lavoisier made seminal scientific discoveries decades to centuries before the introduction of surgical anesthesia on October 16, 1846, there is no evidence to suggest that clinicians began to apply these principles until the last years of the 19th century. We therefore placed this section in the context of when it was used in the development of the medical profession of anesthesiology. Next, we presented practices that attempted to relieve pain before the introduction of surgical anesthesia. These included acupuncture, refrigeration anesthesia, acupressure, and mesmerism.