Knock me out like a ton of bricks

In our pharmacology class we've been learning the basics of general anesthesias. To start off this section we watched this episode of NOVA made in the 1970's on the history of anesthesia. Pretty crazy. What impressed me most were the lives lost or ruined by and during the development of anesthetics. Not just patients, but the doctors and scientists who experimented mostly on themselves, often becoming addicted to the substances or worse. And since addiction was not understood really at all yet, they often faced severe consequences for their research. A classmate found the video online and shared it with the class. I thought it was fascinating and some of you might like it too. It's about an hour long, but the first 11 minutes give a nice backdrop to the story. It was the two dentists portrayed here in the beginning that separately discover the first two general anesthesias. Their stories are pretty interesting as well.