The Independent Inventions of General Anesthesia in 19th century Japan and United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In October of 1804, surgeon Hanaoka Seishū performed the first documented surgery using general anesthesia. Hanaoka’s formulation, a mixture of plant extracts called tsūsensan, was commonly used in Japan, but it had minimal influence elsewhere. It was not until the 1840s that general anesthesia was used outside of Japan. In the eastern United States, four individuals, including dentist William Morton, were independently experimenting with the use of diethyl ether and nitrous oxide as general anesthetics. Unlike Hanaoka’s invention, Morton’s successful use of diethyl ether in a neck tumour removal surgery sparked the rapid development and proliferation of new anesthetic technologies and compounds throughout the world. This paper examines why Hanaoka’s work was not significantly influential outside of Japan, while the later American discoveries achieved global prominence despite being four decades later. Additionally, historical context behind both stories is included. Reasons for this disparity include Japan’s isolationist policy at the time (sakoku) and differences in 19th century Western and Japanese approaches to medical education and research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".