14 BUllETIN O F ANESTHESIA HISTORY Victorian Anesthetics and the Issue of Control by Corey Brady Department of English, University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia Before anesthetics could be fully incorpo rated into medical practice, they had to be accepted by the Victorian public. And from a late 20th century point ofview, the reluctance tht the public exhibited may be extremely difficult to comprehend. In this paper I will examine a number of Victorian texts to see how they express popular anxieties about anesthetics. If we take these texts individu ally and read them unsympathetically, their fears may seem unconvincing or even trivial. However, by gathering them together and making a concerted ef fort to/ee the anxieties they express about the new realm of experi ence that Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed "anesthesia," we may come to understand the Victorians' retience. In addition, we may also learn more about ourselves through such an effort. We still do have residual fears about anesthesia, and by tracing these fears to their historical roots we may learn more about them. A short poem by Emily Dickinson may help us begin to relate to the Victorian frame of mind: Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the Culprit-L ife This poem seems quite simple at first glance, but let us see how much we can un cover by putting it in its cultural context. Dickinson wrote it in 1862, and the sur gery it describes certainly involves anes thetics. For one thing, the "fine incisions" indicate a docile patient. But the poem also directly engages with anesthesia in its para doxical rhetorical form. On one hand, it is essentially a plea addressed to surgeons and written from a perspective identified with the patient. On the other hand, the poem refains from direct address. The speaker urgently wants the surgeons to be careful, but she exhorts them only indirectly, as a distant "they." In effect, the speak has been grammatically and rhetorically re moved-linguistically anesthetized-and is not consciously present at the scene of the operation. But Dickinso's poem also emerges from a context when anesthetics were new, and it relies on this sense of newness for its effect. In order to feel the force of the imagined stir ring of "the Culprit-Life," we need to be struck by the contrat of that stirring move- ment with the physical stillness of the anes thetized patient's body. The poem demands that we rmember vividly that this motion less, insensible body would have been racked by horrible struggles in the recent past. Dickinson asks us to see these struggles trans ferred to the soul and undergone instead by the abstacton "Lz/" The hidden simile is absolutely crucial-this soul in the present operation is like those b odies in past operations. As we will see, this imaginative parallelism between body and soul is in fact a central characteristic of many Victorian conceptions of anesthesia. With the advent of anesthetics, the op erating room that had been a scene of noisy tumult suddenly became terribly silent. But had the struggle actually ended, or had it merely gone under the surface? The expe rience of the patient had changed abruptly from an unspeakable physical torture to an absolute unknown, an emptiness like that of death, waiting to be filled by the fearful patient's imagination. Thus, while the an esthetic state of fered patients a miraculous release from pain, it was also very naturally . a mysterious and potentially threatening realm. Moreover, while the state of full anesthe sia was fearful because of what it hid, the tran sitional phase on the way to full anesthesia excited fears because of the alarming phe nomena that it exhibited. In the Victorian an esthetic experience, this transitional phase was much more extended and dramatic than it is for us today, and it is quite striking to read their written descriptions of it, either as it appeared under the proto-hypnotic tech nique known as mesmerism or under inhala tion anesthetics. Under mesmerism, some patients in this transition phase exhibited strange powers such as mind-reading or even clairvoyance. Other mesmeric subjects could be induced to act in direct contradiction to their waking character; as the mesmerist could exhibit con trol over their sensations and actions by stimulating one or another of the so-called "phrenological organs" on their skulls. For example, he could induce temporary klepto mania by stimulating the organ of Acquisi tiveness, or provoke a verbal or even physi cal attack by stimulating the organ of Com bativeness. Under ether, many patients would begin the transition phase by struggling and cry- ing out that they were being suffocated. Fur ther into anesthesia, women of the most up right character were known to conduct them selves in a manner that they were later horri fied to hear about-writhing lewdly or act ing as though intoxicated. As we will see, many of the deepest fears about anesthesia derived from the various phenomena exhibited in this transition phase. One commonly-expressed concern was that a patient might suffer under anesthe sia-as much as, or even more than without anesthetics-but that he simply  ight not be able torememer th torture. Af ter all, patients in the transition phase seemed to experience heightened, rather than reduced, sensations. The French physician Blandin summed up this fear when he said, [1]t would be wrong to conclude that patients under anesthesia] have not suffered: everything points- to con cluding that, on the contrary they suf fer but have no memory of it.2 To see more clearly how this fear would arise, let's look at an account of a tooth ex traction. The patient was later interviewed, and she insisted that she had felt no pain during this procedure: The patient gasped painfully and after a few seconds struggled to free herself, and the operator was com pelled to hold [the chloroform-soaked sponge] forcibly; pinching her nose to close the nostrils, while her hands were held by his assistant; in fact, to the beholder, it was the most complete ex hibition of burking. She never ap peared to lose consciousness at all, but continued to struggle and oppose througout the operation, calling out in broken English. .. like a person in an hyserical paroxysm. She closed her teeth to resist the introduction of the instrument, and bit Mr. Wood's finger sharply, when he succeeded in forcing them open. At the moment of extracting the tooth I watched her, and she evinced the usual amount of suffering in the usual manner, by contracting her body and crying out, striving to re move the instrument from her mouth."