The creation of anesthesia is the greatest discovery since the wheel. It not only helped the development of medicine in the medical field, but also helped in the field of dentistry. Without anesthesia, medical interventions would not be possible. Some of the procedures that need to be performed then and now would not be possible without some type of anesthetic. They are too painful to perform on a conscious person. Although the original anesthetics are no longer used, they have been used to further advance anesthesia and have helped develop better methods and medicines. The word anesthesia is used to describe the process of rendering a patient unconscious allowing him to be free from surgical pain. There are two main types of anesthetics used for surgical anesthesia, ether and chloroform, which developed around the same time. Both were developed around 1840, but chloroform was used more often as it worked faster and was nonflammable. These anesthetics were indispensable tools for doctors during the Civil War. Boston dentist William T. G. Morton was f...