Anesthesia was once repugnant

A wonderful story by Mike Jay in the Boston Globe, The day pain died , recounts how the first surgical use of anesthesia came long after its pain-killing properties were known. An impediment to its use, however, was the thought that pain relief was repugnant, i.e. there was something wrong in having a pain free operation.

Here is the beginning of Jay's story, and the end (emphasis added):
"The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word "anesthesia" itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city's physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever.
But what precisely was invented that day? Not a chemical - the mysterious substance used by William Morton, the local dentist who performed the procedure, turned out to be simply ether, a volatile solvent that had been in common use for decades. And not the idea of anesthesia - ether, and the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide, had both been thoroughly inhaled and explored. As far back as 1525, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus had recorded that it made chickens "fall asleep, but wake up again after some time without any bad effect," and that it "extinguishes pain" for the duration.
What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain. Operating under anesthetic would transform medicine, dramatically expanding the scope of what doctors were able to accomplish. What needed to change first wasn't the technology - that was long since established - but medicine's readiness to use it.
Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. Though the idea of pain as necessary may seem primitive and brutal to us today, it lingers in certain corners of healthcare, such as obstetrics and childbirth, where epidurals and caesarean sections still carry the taint of moral opprobrium. In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients' base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health.
The "eureka moment" of anesthesia, like the seemingly sudden arrival of many new technologies, was not so much a moment of discovery as a moment of recognition: a tipping point when society decided that old attitudes needed to be overthrown. It was a social revolution as much as a medical one: a crucial breakthrough not only for modern medicine, but for modernity itself. It required not simply new science, but a radical change in how we saw ourselves."
...
"Once Morton had successfully demonstrated his technique of ether anesthesia, it was quickly seen that its implications reached considerably beyond the dental business. Before 1846 was out, it had been successfully tried by the most celebrated surgeon in Britain, Robert Liston, who pronounced that the new "Yankee dodge" had "the most perfect and satisfactory results" and was "a fine thing for operating surgeons." It was enthusiastically championed by an emerging generation of medical humanitarians, and the new buzzword "anesthesia" crystallized the sense of novelty and medical miracle. Chemistry had, as Thomas Beddoes had prophesied, come to rule over pain.
Despite its successes, resistance to the idea didn't vanish overnight. Until the end of the century, some doctors would maintain that pain had a necessary role in the preservation of life, but from 1846 onward they were outnumbered by those who insisted that it was the job of a physician to inflict as little of it as possible. Some religious voices would hold out for a good deal longer: Pope Pius XII would confirm that "the Christian's duty of renunciation and of interior purification is not an obstacle to the use of anaesthetics" only in February 1957.
Despite the long resistance, that demonstration in the Ether Dome marked a transition that was as irreversible as it was historic. The practice of medicine finally achieved a goal that it had, until that moment, never truly been able to imagine: loosening pain's age-old stranglehold on humanity. And in a sense, the invention was the least of it. The real milestone witnessed in Boston that day was the moment when culture had finally caught up with chemistry."

The article comes from Jay's new book The Atmosphere of Heaven.

Update: Dubner at Freakonomics follows up on this post and draws some interesting comments, including this one:

“So discredited had narcotic drugs become by the middle of the seventeenth century that when Nicolas Bailly, a barber-surgeon of Troys, administered a narcotic potion to a patient before an operation, the venture aroused widespread condemnation. Bailly was arrested and fined for practicing witchcraft. The stupefaction of patients by administration of herbal remedies was then forbidden in France under heavy penalty.”
(Victor Robinson, M.D.: Victory Over Pain. A History of Anesthesia, London: Sigma, 1947. p.40)— kaloniki "