History of anaesthesia: Podcasts

Bedside Rounds is a medical podcast by Adam Rodman about fascinating stories in clinical medicine. He started this podcast in the summer of 2014 when he was a second-year resident in internal medicine at Oregon Health and Science University.

From failed attempts to fatal consequences, the introduction of anaesthesia in 1846 was a major leap forward for medicine and surgery. But it forced doctors and patients to grapple with the many new questions it raised. What did it mean to lay claim to a discovery? What if the pain of surgery was beneficial? And what if the anaesthetic was deadly? ETHER/OR explores the problems of those early days of anaesthesia, but if you listen carefully you'll realise the debates those first anaesthetists had still echo in our operating theatres today.

This podcast takes an entertaining and informative approach to telling the stories of the people and events that make up the history of modern surgery.

Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin welcome you to Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine. Every Friday, they dig through the annals of medical history to uncover all the odd, weird, wrong, dumb and just gross ways we’ve tried to fix people over the years. Educational? You bet! Fun? We hope!

This podcast might not actually kill you, but it covers so many things that can. Each episode tackles a different disease, from its history, to its biology, and finally, how scared you need to be. Ecologists and epidemiologists Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke make infectious diseases acceptable fodder for dinner party conversation and provide the perfect cocktail recipe to match.

Dr Christine is an anaesthesiologist at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne and co-convenor of the Master of Perioperative Medicine at Monash University, where she is an Adjunct Associate Professor. Chris has been involved in the study of the history of the specialty for over 30 years and has many publications on the subject, including the book The Chloroformist, published by Melbourne University Press in 2021 She has been an Honorary Curator of the Geoffrey Kaye Museum of Anaesthetic History since 1989, a position she still holds. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the current Wood-Library Museum Laureate of the History of Anesthesiology.

In this episode retired Colonel Soundararajan ‘Jag’ Jagdish talks to Professor Peter Mahoney about the early development of military anaesthesia, their lived experiences as deployed military personnel and what went on behind the scenes.

In Part 2 of the podcast Peter and Jag talk about the emerging threats from Iraq and Afghanistan which demanded a completely different approach and considerable clinical agility and innovation. Because of the nature of warfare the experience of the anaesthetists involved recorded here may sometimes be disturbing.

Dr Alessia Pannese explores a painted documentation of a relatively little known event in Oxford local history: the first intravenous anaesthesia during this TORCH Bite-Size talk at the Ashmolean Museum LiveFriday.

When Dr John Crowhurst was a medical student at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in the early 1970s, a consultant mentioned a remarkable fact; due to mismanaged anaesthesia, “the Yanks killed more of their own at Pearl Harbor than did the Japanese in their attack in 1941.”

Purple Pen Podcast are joined by anaesthetist A/Prof Christine Ball to discuss her book, The Chloroformist.

Anesthesia, like all great medical breakthroughs, was brought about by necessity. Also like many medical breakthroughs, the discovery of anesthesia was an accident. Ivan Stewart joins us yet again to delve into the exciting history of ether and chloroform.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of anaesthetics, from laughing gas in the 1790s to the discovery of “blessed chloroform”.