The first operation under anesthesia in Ireland took place 175 years ago when John MacDonnell, a surgeon at the Richmond Hospital, Dublin amputated the arm of Mary Kane on January 1st 1847. This occurred less than three months after the first public demonstration of the use of ether for painless surgery in Boston. Over the next 150 years, anesthesia was to evolve from an apprentice-based craft to become a highly technical specialty, integral not just in the operating theater but also to a wide range of other medical settings.

The book, in the first published history of the specialty in Ireland, describes the personalities, institutions and innovators who led the development of anesthesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from 1847 to the foundation of the College of Anaesthetists of Ireland in 1998.