It’s hard to imagine but for centuries surgery was performed without anaesthetics. No wonder it was considered a treatment of last resort, one that patients often failed to survive.

The ancient Sumerians first used herbal remedies derived from opium poppies as anaesthetics in 4200 BC. A 10th century Persian work describes a cesarean section on a woman who was administered a special wine designed to knock her out during the surgery. Opiate mixtures were used by physicians in Europe starting in the 13th century. The Chinese and Japanese also did a lot of pioneering work in anaesthesia.

In 1769, an English philosopher named Joseph Priestly discovered nitrous oxide (“laughing gas”). But the stuff was used mostly to get high. It was only in 1799 that doctors began using it in surgery—mostly for dental extractions.

In 1842, a Georgia doctor named Crawford Long used a better drug, called ether, as an anaesthetic while removing a cyst from a patient’s neck.  But ether irritated the lungs.

The breakthrough came 5 years later when the Scottish doctor James Young Simpson discovered the anaesthetic properties of a liquid known as chloroform. The story goes that Simpson and 2 of his pals inhaled the substance one night while hanging out in Simpson’s dining room. Within moments, “a general mood or humor and cheer set in.” Suddenly, all 3 men collapsed only to wake up the next morning.

Simpson realized he was onto something. He tried out the stuff on his niece. She uttered the words “I am an angel” and passed out.

In 1847, Simpson began using chloroform as an anaesthetic during childbirth. It worked. But the use of anaesthetics in delivering babies was controversial. Over the milennia, the pain and terror that women experienced during childbirth was considered the will of God, an enduring punishment for Adam and Eve’s Original Sin in the Garden of Eden.

It wasn’t until Queen Victoria used chloroform during the delivery of Prince Leopold in 1853 that the critics backed off. Simpson, who was born on this date in 1811, garnered the recognition he earned and chloroform became the foundation of modern anaesthetics.

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