I didn’t really think about it until I saw them wheel one of the bodies out ahead of me, that that was going to be me, laying in the same position, not dead, but dead to the world. The procedure was described to me as something relatively simple, an endoscopy, from the Greek tendon meaning “inside” and skopein, meaning “to look”, a procedure during which the gastroenterologist would push a long flexible tube with a tiny camera mounted on it down my digestive tube and into my stomach to attempt to discover the root causes of my persistent heartburn, and see if there was any sign of the cell damage that can be a precursor to cancer. I was told that the procedure would involve an anesthetic, and it wasn’t until the day before that I felt some sense of giddiness and excitement at the thought that I was going to be knocked out, if only for a brief time. I have never had any kind of surgery, except for a few stitches here and there when out of clumsiness or distractedness I’ve cut myself. I do however have an interest in altered experiences and what can happen to the body and consciousness with the introduction of a foreign substance.
While numbing substances have been used in primitive surgical procedures since time immemorial effective anesthetics are a product of modernity and Western medicine. The Inca were highly skilled at a procedure called trepanation, used to treat disorders ranging from epilepsy to scalp diseases, which involved drilling a hole in the skull with silver chisels and obsidian knives. During the procedure the patient would chew on coca leaves to numb the pain, as would the Incan surgeon, spitting into the wound as the operation proceeded to numb the surrounding area. The Chinese used the plant henbane, which contains scopolamine, later isolated and extracted and found to have an amnesia-producing effect, partly blocking the memory of the pain of surgery.[1] Ether - called “oil of sweet vitriol” by the 16th Century botanist who found that the distillation of sulfuric acid and ethanol produced a substance whose vapors caused a dizziness and light-headedness - wasn’t used as a full body anesthetic until the middle of the 19th Century, when it revolutionized the potential of surgery and the medical exploration and treatment of the living body.
