Controlled unconsciousness, and the management of pain.
9 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Cancer Pain Relief
World Health Organization · 1986
Introduces a three-step ladder moving from non-opioid to weak then strong opioid analgesics as pain intensifies, a simple stepwise protocol that…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Difficult Tracheal Intubation in Obstetrics
R. S. Cormack & J. Lehane · 1984
Proposes grading what a laryngoscopist actually sees of the vocal cords into four categories, turning a subjective impression of a difficult airway…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Insensibility during Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation
Henry Jacob Bigelow · 1846
Reports the first public demonstrations of ether anaesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, arguing from these operations that surgical pain is…
+4 more at this level
10 works
World Health Organization
Introduces a three-step ladder moving from non-opioid to weak then strong opioid analgesics as pain intensifies, a simple stepwise protocol that reshaped cancer and acute pain management worldwide.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Recommends against opioids as first-line treatment for chronic pain outside cancer and end-of-life care, based on a systematic review finding limited evidence of long-term benefit against substantial risk of addiction and overdose.
link checked 17 Sept 2026R. S. Cormack & J. Lehane
Proposes grading what a laryngoscopist actually sees of the vocal cords into four categories, turning a subjective impression of a difficult airway into a shared, recordable description.
American Society of Anesthesiologists Task Force on Sedation and Analgesia by Non-Anesthesiologists
Sets out monitoring and staffing standards for sedation given by clinicians who are not anaesthesiologists, arguing that the risk of sedation lies mainly in the transition between depths that are hard to detect without deliberate monitoring.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Srinivasa N. Raja et al.
Redefines pain as an experience associated with or resembling tissue damage, deliberately severing the requirement that damage be present, so that pain without an identified lesion is not thereby illegitimate.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry Jacob Bigelow
Reports the first public demonstrations of ether anaesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, arguing from these operations that surgical pain is no longer a necessary condition of surgery.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Snow
A systematic physiological study of chloroform's dose-dependent stages of action, arguing anaesthesia should be titrated and monitored as a controllable physiological state rather than administered as a fixed dose — the study was left unfinished by Snow's death and published posthumously.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edmond I. Eger II, Lawrence J. Saidman & Brigid Brandstater
Defines anaesthetic potency as the alveolar concentration that prevents movement in half of subjects on incision, giving anaesthesiology a measurable standard for comparing agents that had previously been ranked only by clinical impression.
Yves Auroy, Patricia Narchi, Albert Messiah, Laurent Litt, Bernard Rouvier & Kamran Samii
Surveys a year of regional anaesthesia across a whole country to measure how rarely but how severely it fails, giving the specialty its first large-scale estimate of the real complication rate rather than one drawn from case reports.
Rolf-Detlef Treede et al.
Proposes a systematic classification of chronic pain for ICD-11 that treats chronic primary pain — pain persisting with no clear underlying disease — as a diagnosis in its own right rather than merely a symptom awaiting explanation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026