In 1846, William T. G. Morton publicly demonstrated ether anaesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital. The event transformed surgery by making longer, more complex operations possible with far less suffering. This new surgical age later made vascular, cardiac, orthopaedic and transplant procedures possible, all of which depended increasingly on safe control of bleeding and clotting.

Anaesthesia changed the imaginative meaning of pain, the body, and medical intervention in modern literature. Writers could now portray surgery not only as horror or endurance but as a threshold experience between consciousness, dream, and survival, influencing poets like W.H. Auden in their explorations of mortality.