The conquest of pain: a profile of two dentists

Abstract

Horace Wells and William T.G. Morton were key players in the dental profession because, for the first time, they postulated to the medical world the application of Inhalation Anaesthesia in the service of surgical practice providing patients with the possibility of painless surgery. This work is intend to discourse briefly the vicissitudes that delayed the general acceptance of anaesthesia I propose to frame them against the background of the contemporary period in America, where Anaesthesia was born, and, in Britain, where it was nursed.