Recent discovery provides evidence to support ancient texts about a herbal anaesthetic that was said to have been used during surgery
2-MIN READ2-MIN ListenShi HuangPublished: 9:00am, 1 Jun 2026On October 16, 1846, the American dentist William T.G. Morton successfully demonstrated the use of inhaled ether anaesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, an event widely considered a turning point in modern surgery.
Their use had previously been recorded in ancient Chinese texts, but now the first physical evidence confirming this has been found.
The paper was published on Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity.
