Toxic Plants

  Dr William Morton pretending to invent anaesthetics  Anaesthesia: a state in which someone does not feel pain, usually because of drugs they have been given (Cambridge English Dictionary) If you do a Google search for “history of anaesthesia”, most search results suggest that anaesthetics were invented by Dr William Morton of Boston in 1846, who was the first to use ether to perform a dental extraction.  There are occasional nods in the direction of earlier, plant based anaesthetics, mainly to dismiss them as unimportant.  I particularly like the comment by the Royal College of Anaesthetists of the United Kingdom, who say: “Although a number of drugs used in modern anaesthesia have their origins in substances found in plants, those early concoctions are irrelevant to the development of effective, drug-induced anaesthesia.” And of course, I completely agree.  If I am going to have a painful surgical procedure performed, I would much rather have a modern anaesthetic than a plant based