First Ether Narcosis in Croatia

The history of Croatian anaesthesiology begins in Zadar: the first operation under ether narcosis in Croatia was performed here on 13^th March 1847. William Thomas Green was the first to publicly demonstrate ether anaesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on 16^th October 1846. Only five months after this, and two or three months after London, Paris and Vienna - surgeons Cezar Pellegrini-Danieli, Jerolim Definis, and Toma Fumagallo, with the assistance of Ivan Bettini, performed a procedure on an eighty-year-old woman with incarcerated hernia, using ether narcosis for the first time in Croatia. The report on the usage of ether anaesthesia was published on the same day in the Zadar newspaper Gazzeta di Zara. Two months later, it was used in Dubrovnik, three months later in Split, and five months later in Sisak. No reference was found about the first narcosis in Zagreb.