Editor's Note: Shauna Devine, Ph.D., is a historian of Civil War and American medicine. She has a Ph.D. in medical history and currently holds a joint appointment as a research fellow at the Schulich ...

Anesthesia was in its infancy when the American Civil War began in 1861. The sheer number of casualties gave surgeons on both sides the opportunity to gain experience with the first two anesthetic ...

Sedation, together with analgesia, amnesia and muscle paralysis, is the end result of general anesthesia, which is an induced, reversible and controlled loss of consciousness. Sedation, on its own, is ...

Anesthesia works by using medications (anesthetics) to temporarily block pain signals from traveling along your nerves to your brain, or by numbing the brain itself to cause unconsciousness. The ...

Scientists from Scripps Research have shown how anesthetics cause clusters of lipids in the cell membrane to break apart, triggering downstream processes that lead to a loss of consciousness. Share on ...

Anesthesia is a type of medication that prevents people from feeling pain during or following surgery. There are four main categories of anesthesia: local, regional, general, and sedation. Share on ...

General anesthesia produces a state of induced, controlled and reversible loss of consciousness, which is the end result of sedation, analgesia, amnesia and muscle paralysis. It is a vital component ...