Edmond I Eger II
Lawrence J. Saidman
Rod N. Westhorpe
Editors

2014

This story describes events in three succeeding eras: first, events during the time preceding and immediately after the demonstration of anesthesia; then those in the subsequent 90 years of slow evolution of the specialty, ending in the 1950s; and finally those from the 1950s to the present, a period of explosive growth. Our lives span the last of these, the era in which modern anesthesia evolved from empiricism—“doing what worked”—to a practice relying on science and evidenced-based medicine.