The first three days in the history of surgical anaesthesia in England

It is generally accepted that the first successful administration of ether anaesthesia in England was in London on 19 December 1846 when, at the direction of Dr Boott, Dr J . Robinson anaesthetized a Miss Lonsdale, who was Dr Boott’s niece, and a molar tooth was extracted. Two days later Professor Liston performed an amputation and avulsion of the great toes under ether at University College Hospital. Dr Boott received information about a new method of mitigating pain during surgery from his friend, Professor Bigelow of Boston. The letter dated 28 November 1846 was brought to Liverpool by the Acadia, one of the four wooden paddle steamers belonging to the Cunard Company, which sailed from New York on 1 December and reached Liverpool on 16 December 1846. have made extensive searches in an attempt to ascertain when Dr Boott received the letter from Dr Bigelow and when it was that Dr Boott communicated the news of the discovery of anaesthesia to Dr Robinson but, until the present time, the answers to these questions have remained unknown. The authors were, therefore, extremely interested to find an important reference to this problem in an article written by Dr Robinson in 1855 in the American Journal of Dental Science (New Series).6 The paper is entitled Anaesthesia in Dental Surgery-Zts history and introduction into Europe and, so far as is known, no reference has been made to it in the various histories of anaesthesia. Many