Cocaine as medicine in ancient time

Cocaine leaves grow on trees and the earliest know use of cocaine dates back nearly 5000 years, to sometime in the year 3000 BC.

In southwestern Ecuador and northern Chile, researchers found traces of cocaine from hair and remain of human mummies of 4000 years old.

In Peru drawings on old pats and other artifacts show cocaine being chewed by humans. One 2500 years old pot made by the Moche tribe shows people with their cheeks full of cocaine leaves and carrying gourds full of leaves.

Cocaine was known to the Incas of ancient Peru, who chewed coca leaves for stimulation and applied the spittle to the skull to reduce the pain of trepanning.

The Incas believed this plant was a divine gift created to alleviate hunger and thirst and they tightly controlled coca cultivation.

It was viewed by those who tended it as a scared symbol of endurance, strength and even fertility. Its use was reserved for the most important members of Incan society: royalty and certain nobles.

Cocaine was first identified as the active alkaloid in the coca leaf in 1857. It was not identified medically as a local anesthetic until 1884.

Sir William Hook published the first English illustration of coca in 1835 along with a translation of a book by the German naturalist, Edward Poeppig that contain warnings about the addictive properties of cocaine.
Cocaine as medicine in ancient time

History of Anesthesiology

History of Anesthesiology
Anesthesiology is a knowledge or study how to have a condition of having sensation blocked. Other definition is “reversible lack of awareness”. This will allow patients to undergo surgery and procedures without feel pain.

In ancient Incas, shaman coked up chewed coca leaves and drilled holes in the heads of their patients while splitting into the wounds they’d inflicted.

Dated in 4200 BC, Sumerian people used opium poppies as herbal remedy. Opium then was introduced to China in 330 BC and India in 600 BC.

Assyrian and Egyptian physicians obtained artificial sleep for their patient by quickly compressing the Carotid vessels of their neck. This practice was followed as well by the Greek physicians. Arab translation of the Greek medicine helped to make Islamic physicians supreme in the middle ages.

Abulcasis and Avicenna wrote about anesthesia in their book: Al-Tasrif and The Canon of Medicine. Baghdad at that time became the world’s leading medical and drug center. With the skill of the Arab Alchemists, the art of drug making began to evolve into the science of Pharmacology. Western physicians emerging from the Middle Ages found the Arab pharmacopoeia, in which a list of medicinal plants composed the anesthetic armamentarium.

British Chemist Humphry Davy in 1799 discovered a nitrous oxide or a laughing gas that have anesthetic quality. The discovery was ignored until Connecticut dentist Horace Wells began to experiment using nitrous oxide as an anesthetic during tooth surgery.

In 1846, dentist, William Thomas Green Morton performed the first public demonstration of diethyl ether (then called sulfuric ether) as an anesthetic agent, for a patient undergoing an excision of a vascular tumor from his neck. Chloroform was introduced as a surgical anesthetic by Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson in 1847. Although it can eased pain of labor, chloroform had higher risks than those associated with ether.

The first effective local anesthetic was cocaine. Isolated in 1859, it was first used by Carl Koller, at the suggestion of Sigmund Freud, in ophthalmic surgery in 1884.

Chemical substance that has a morphine-like action, Opioids was first used by Racoviceanu-Piteşti, who reported his work in 1901.
History of Anesthesiology