Yearly Archives: 2013

Laughing Gas Gets A Safety Check

To anesthesiologists, laughing gas is no joke. Nitrous oxide was one of the first chemicals used to make surgery and tooth-pulling painless. Back in the 1840s, Horace Wells, a dentist in Hartford, Conn., did his best to popularize it as an anesthetic agent. Despite some failed demonstrations early on, use of the gas during surgery eventually...