How long have we had dental anesthesia?

Though dentistry has been around in one form or another since the days of primitive man, painless extraction wasn’t available until the 1830s. In the beginning, teeth were removed with a well-placed chisel and a hard swing of a mallet. Thousands of years later, during peaks of the great Greek and Roman civilizations, the chisel-and-mallet method was abandoned in favor of forceps.

In the 1790s, a British chemist began to experiment with the use of nitrous oxide as a pain-inhibitor and noted that its most famous side effect, laughing. He coined the anesthetic’s popular nickname, laughing gas. During the next 50 years, the gas became very popular. People were so taken with the exhilarating effects of the gas that inhalation parties became the rage. In 1863 the gas was combined with oxygen, becoming a staple of surgical procedures.

Soon after the adoption of nitrous oxide, local anesthetics were developed. Just prior to the 1900s, cocaine was used, but once its addictive qualities were identified, the search began for a suitable alternative. Many of the alternatives were forms of synthetic cocaine, but none were successful until 1905 when a German chemist discovered procaine, which he named Novocain. The anesthetic proved extremely popular with dental professionals, as well as a public relieved at the sound of “painless dentistry