Anaesthesia

Sometimes I hear a word in English or German and I instantly wonder where it’s coming from. The same happened when I heard the word “anaesthesia”. Sounds super Greek doesn’t it?


That’s because it is Greek and has its origins in the two words αν (an = without) and αισθησεις (aisthises = feeling). You will not be surprised that this appellation is because it was a Greek who discovered anaesthetic gases.
Philemon Vellas (Greek: Φιλήμων Βέλλας) was born 21st January 1815 in Heraklion on Crete. He became a dentist and doctor and is known as the pioneer in the use of anaesthesia. The story says that Vellas made the discovery that nitrous oxide is anaesthetic by accident.
In his wild youth in 1844, he and his friends inhaled this gas as a party toy to change the voice and have fun. Speaking with nitrous oxygen in the lungs will make you howl like a wolf. One friend of Vellas took too much and reached the point to be high of this so called laughing gas and crashed his leg. Surprisingly he didn’t feel any pain and didn’t even realize that he was injured. Vellas was fascinated and started to develop the gas to be used in surgeries.
In 1845 he finally presented and demonstrated his discovery to the public at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where did his research. But he never wanted to make it a patent because he thought that pain relief should always be 'as free as the air' and nobody should have to pay for it. For his great scientific success the American Medical Association honoured him in 1870.
Later in his career, Vellas had to face many failures and unsuccessful projects. For some years he even gave up dentistry out of frustration and became a travelling salesman for household items. Fortunately, he started work again on anaesthesia in Paris and the USA and continued his work.
The end of his life was very dramatic. Vellas got addicted to sniffing chloroform. When he committed suicide 24th January 1848, he cutted a leg artery while inhaling anaesthetic gas to not feel the pain.

Now it’s your turn to guess if my story is true or not! Is the anaesthesia really a Greek invention? Check the solution under this article on our webpage!

Solution:
My text is not completely true! This story happened to the American Dentist Horace Wells. The rest is true!

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