General anaesthesia

General anaesthesia is a drug-induced loss of consciousness from which a patient cannot be roused even by pain; the first successful surgery on record under it was performed by the Japanese surgeon Hanaoka Seishū on 14 November 1804. Attempts to produce it appear in the writings of ancient peoples from the Sumerians to the Chinese. Together with antiseptic technique, its development in the 19th century allowed the transition to modern surgery, which pain had made a last resort, and in the 20th century tracheal intubation, monitoring and new agents made it safer.