Abstract
The aim of this article is to investigate how pain management during surgery was approached by physicians before the advent of ether anaesthesia. From the available sources, it appears that although surgical procedures are at least 6,000 years old, efforts to find a method to suppress the pain associated with them only appeared in European and Islamic culture in the Middle Ages, and then only sporadically.
Similarly, references to the use of anaesthesia by some doctors in ancient India and China are probably more myth than reality. The current anaesthetic mantra about mankind's ancient efforts to suppress pain during surgical treatment does not seem to apply, and the claim that people of that time, compared with the period after the advent of humanism and the development of science, were more tolerant of pain, especially when it involved someone else, is more plausible.
Although plant extracts had been known to be used for pain relief since antiquity, they were limited to conservative treatment of various ailments, not anaesthesia during surgery, and the basic procedure was to fix the patient. The article cites data on extant medical texts with possible links to the use of anaesthesia from the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India through ancient Greece and Rome, medieval and Islamic states and Europe up to the 19th century.