Anesthesia as pain relief is amazing, and we still have trouble understanding how it really works. What we do know is that it has played an important role in medicine for centuries.
This role was made uncomfortably clear to me more than 35 years ago when I had to perform an emergency cesarean section on a woman using lidocaine as my only anesthetic. There was no anesthesiologist available for this 2 a.m. emergency, and this was before the days of routine epidurals.
