Three ether inhalers with inscriptions stating that they had been used in early ether anaesthesia were found. All three inhalers were initially linked to WTG Morton. Two of the inhalers were probably among several types of inhalers used by Morton. The third inhaler was found to have been incorrectly attributed to Morton. It was first used by John Foster Brewster Flagg, a dentist in Philadelphia.

Eugène-Louis Doyen published illustrations of two pharyngeal tubes in his five-volume surgical textbook, Traité de Thérapeutique Chirurgicale et de Technique Opératoire. The first volume of Doyen's textbook was published in 1908 and contains the earliest known illustration of one of Doyen's pharyngeal tubes. The Hewitt airway was described in Lancet in the same year. No information on the development of the Hewitt airway or Doyen's pharyngeal tubes was found. Doyen's pharyngeal tubes were functionally similar to modern supraglottic airways.

The Heister mouth gag is attributed to Lorenz Heister, an eighteenth century German surgeon. There is no evidence that Heister designed the mouth gag, the earliest known illustration of which is in the 1719 edition of Heister's Chirurgie. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Heister gag was widely available for use during anaesthesia. It is now rarely used by anaesthestists, but occasionally used by surgeons during oral surgery.Several dozen mouth gags were available to anaesthetists at the beginning of the 20th century. Most were developed after 1870. For reasons that are not clear, one gag, attributed to Lorenz Heister (1683-1758), a German surgeon and botanist, became one of the most popular mouth gags used by anaesthetists. Remarkably, the Heister mouth gag dates back at least three centuries -its earliest known illustration is in the 1719 edition of Heister's Chirurgie 1 . This article explores the earliest known descriptions of the Heister mouth gag, which date from the 18th century, and its more recent use by anaesthetists and surgeons. The possible origins of the mouth gag, Heister's opinion of it and his description of the management of "spasm of the jaw" are considered. Although there is no evidence the mouth gag attributed to Heister was invented by him, Heister's name has traditionally been associated with it and the term 'Heister mouth gag' is used in this article.

Cataract surgery is now usually performed with the aid of one of several techniques of local anaesthesia. The cornea and conjunctiva are well innervated and in modern societies there is usually an expectation that there will be minimal or no pain during procedures on the eye. Cataracts were treated in the early 19th century by extraction through an incision in the cornea, inferior displacement of the lens with a needle (depression or couching) or by fragmentation of the lens using a needle. For the latter procedure, the needle was introduced either through the cornea, anterior to the iris (keratonyxis) or through the "sclerotic" (sclera), posterior to the iris (scleroticonyxis). This article provides a brief biography of Dr Arthur Jacob, one of the leading ophthalmologists of his time, a description by him of the making of his needle for cataract surgery and extracts from two descriptions of cataract surgery without anaesthesia. The two descriptions are unusual as they also include the patient's responses to the procedures and provide a vivid and chilling account of surgery in the first half of the 19th century. The descriptions, from the late 1830s and 1850, are within a few years of the introduction of ether anaesthesia and several decades before the development of measures for infection control. No indication of the success rates and rates of complications of ocular surgical procedures were found. Surgical procedures were then not commonly performed and the mortality from major procedures was high.

Joseph Rice: the earliest known Australian to have received ether for a surgical procedure John Snow's book, On the inhalation of the vapour of ether in surgical operations 1 , contains a list of surgical cases at St George's Hospital and the University College Hospital, London, for which he had administered ether 1. Snow's first case at the University College Hospital is interesting because the patient, Joseph Rice (age 28), was described as an Australian who had travelled to London to undergo surgery (Figure 1). The surgeon was Robert Liston (1794-1847) and the operation, a lithotomy, was performed on 3 May 1847. The patient was discharged on 6 June. Further details of Joseph Rice could not be determined with any certainty. An internet search for persons named Joseph Rice yielded two convicts who were transported to Australia, the first in 1826 2 and the second in 1830 3. The internet database contained information about their convictions and transportation to Australia, but their ages were not recorded. There were also other residents of Australia (e.g. free settlers) called Joseph Rice. One person who would have been around 28 years old in 1847 was Joseph Rice (1818-1877), a ship's steward and later owner of the Black Bull Hotel in Geelong. He was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and his parents were Thomas Rice and Mary Boigue. However it is not known if he had travelled to London in 1846 or 1847. A search of passenger lists revealed Mr J. Rice as a passenger on the ship Ganges, which left Sydney on 6 October 1846 for London 4. This person may have been Liston's patient on 3 May 1847. The typical duration of a journey by ship from Australia to London in the 1840s was four months. If Liston's patient, Joseph Rice, had left Sydney on the Ganges