It is an abiding mystery why the famous British chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829), who experimented widely with nitrous oxide (”laughing gas”) in 1800 and was well aware of its ability to induce insensibility to pain, never made what to us is the obvious next step and develop it as a surgical anesthetic. This is particularly hard to understand since Davy had been apprenticed at age 16 to a busy surgeon and must have been well aware of the crying need for something like it. Various theories have been proposed, such as the callousness of surgeons, all of them unconvincing in one way or another. Davy realized that no good instruments were available to control the administering of gases, and that a lethal dose of the gas was a constant threat, but he was adept in instrumentation – he invented the Davy lamp to protect coal miners from flame-induced explosions – and he could readily have put his talent to work on it. Not till 1846, with the demonstration of ether in an actual operation, did anesthesia become a necessary part of surgery.

REFERENCE: Jacob MC and Sauter MJ. Why did Humphry Davy and associates not pursue the pain-alleviating effects of nitrous oxide? J Hist Med 2002; 57:161–176

Submitted by Ron Fishman from the Cogan Ophthalmic History Society.