A Japanese surgeon used general anesthesia decades before ether surgery
In 1804, Japanese surgeon Hanaoka Seishū performed breast surgery using a herbal anesthetic preparation that rendered his patient unconscious. This was decades before ether anesthesia became established in Western surgery. Hanaoka's method was developed within a different medical tradition and did not become the basis of modern inhaled anesthesia, but it demonstrates that surgical anesthesia has more than one historical origin.