Pharmacologic discovery by anesthesiologists

The discovery of anesthesia in the 1840s has been said to be the first great contribution of pharmacology: yet pharmacology at the time was hardly in a formative stage. It was only after the Franco‐Prussian War that Schmiedeberg established the first laboratory of pharmacology at Strassburg. It is not as simple to discern when the roots of anesthesiology took hold. John Snow, the first physician to devote all of his time to this field, possessed the intellectual qualities, but at a time when it was not possible to benefit from advances in basic science that would have made experimentation possible. Anesthesiology became a true specialty only when its adherents looked beyond mere technical procedure to engage in teaching and investigation. If a time were to be cited for this transition, it would be the late 1920s when Ralph Waters laid the groundwork for the first academic department of anesthesia at Wisconsin. What have been the anesthesiologic contributions to pharmacology since then? One is at first beset with the problem of definition, to define anesthesiology's role in pharmacology. The contribution of anesthesiology may be found largely in the area of applied pharmacology with an emphasis not unlike that of Claude Bernard on the use of drugs to elucidate physiologic processes. But anesthesiology has not overlooked two other traditional pharmacologic aims: to define the safe limits of usage of drugs and to discover and assist in the evaluation of new agents.