| Abstract |
The aim of this study was to examine the evolution of the meaning of the words related to anesthesia, analgesia, and pain throughout ancient Greek literature. All relative words were searched in all extant ancient Greek manuscripts using the Thesaurus Lingua Graeca (TLG) electronic program. This program is an electronic database of the entire ancient Greek literature, itemizing the works of all classic authors. The database includes search options for a combined search. For example, a particular word can be sought in a particular work, author or in all classic literature, and the program automatically provides the number of citations together with the relevant text. The relevant citations were then examined in the original Greek texts and compared to classic English translations.
The word ‘anaesthesia’ was used in many ancient texts and states multiple concepts throughout antiquity: In philosophy expresses the absence of sensation, the lack of affection or coma, the insensibility to pleasure and pain, and also the deficiency of character. With the adverb ‘anaesthetos’ Aristotle described the indefinable time. In history the word ‘anaesthesia’ was used for political indifference; in rhetory for the politically unconcerned man. ‘Anaesthesia’ is a very old word since it was first found in Thucydides’ (460 – 400 c BCE) texts. Many physicians though consider Plato (427‐348/7 c BCE) as the fist author which used ‘anaesthesia’ in texts. ‘Narke’, the word that produced ‘narcosis’ is also found in many Greek ancient texts. ‘Narke’ means numbness, deadness, impotence of the nerves, and also is the name of the flat fish torpedo which narcotizes its victims with electric ray. ‘Anaesthesia’ whether used in philosophical, historic, rhetoric or in medical ancient Greek texts, generally expresses ‘lack of perception’. This concept could be considered as the origin of ‘modern anaesthesia’.
The word “anaesthesia” appears twelve times in five Hippocratic texts to describe loss of sensation by a disease process. This observation reveals Hippocrates as the first Greek writer to use the word in a medical rather than a philosophical contex. Hippocrates was also the first Greek physician to keep an airway open by bypassing a pharyngeal obstruction with the insertion of narrow tubes into the swollen throat of a patient with quinsy, thus facilitating airflow into the lungs.
Starting from the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod the significance attributed to sleep by the Greek‐Roman antiquity is traced in myths referring to the god of sleep, Hypnos. Hypnos, a very ancient deity of the Greek mythology, is mainly represented under two contradictory yet complementary images: in the one he is associated with darkness, oblivion, pain and most of all with death, while in the other he is presented as a benign, pleasant young god who carries out the commands of other deities to quieten down through sleep both mortals and immortals and estow them the care‐freeing elements of sleep.
The philosophical issue of sleep was explored extensively by ancient Greek scholars including Aristotle. Hippocrates approached the issue from a physiologist’s perspective. He had noticed that during sleep the body cannot perceive external stimuli and it is the soul, the contemporary subconscious state, which not only keeps its functions but even takes over those of the body. In the work Dreams he clearly differentiates the state of sleep from the waking state. However, he only refers to natural sleep and not pharmacological sleep, although Hippocrates knew the hypnotic properties of various substances and herbs, and he used it mainly for painful conditions.
The knowledge regarding sleep inducing substances in ancient Greek civilization can be traced in various myths, like Medea’s myth, or later, in many classic texts.
The interpretation of pain in ancient Greek texts is multidimensional, and includes the intense somatic pain as well as the strong psychic pain, as it is shown from the plethora of words that are synonyms to pain in classic writings. Apart from the numerous expressions of pain, many analgesic cures are also traced in these manuscripts, like the ‘odynefata pharmaka’ that are described in Homeric epics.
In the Hippocratic texts, “analgesia” is related to “anaesthesia” for the first time, when it is pointed out that an unconscious patient is insensitive to pain. Hippocrates and his followers rationalized pain as a clinical parameter and as a valuable diagnostic and prognostic tool. They used expressive and precise adjectives and well‐defined characteristics of pain,
such as location, duration or relation to other symptoms, to elucidate a disease process. They also had a wide terminology for the various types of pain, still in use today. Many cures were described for the treatment of pain, including incisions, effusions, venesection, purges, cauterization and, most interestingly, the use of many plants such as opium or the application of soporific substances. In particular, Hippocrates refers to opium poppy as “sleep inducing”
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Ερμηνευτική προσέγγιση της "αναισθησίας" του "ύπνου" και του "πόνου"στην αρχαία Ελλάδα : μαρτυρίες αρχαίων συγγραφέων
