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I've started compiling a list of herbs describing various anaesthetic properties at User:Mike Serfas/anaesthesia; many of these have a long history of medical use. I think it can be a useful resource for expanding this template. Mike Serfas 16:09, 26 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
(Please clean up the template.)70.74.35.144 (talk) 11:23, 26 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
To start with, it looks like anaesthetics are being conflated with analgesics (which are differentiated from anesthetics in the first sentence of the anaesthetic article). Ancient pain relief might be a better title than ancient anaesthetics. I'm not even sure how relevant/coherent the term ancient anaesthetics are. Anaesthetics don't seem like they were really even necessary until the development of effective surgical techniques. Prior to that, analgesics would've been more important. Aside from various Solanaceae and coca, and their alkaloids the remainder of the plants and chemicals aren't anaesthetics. Willow is certainly best known as an analgesic.
Secondly, I'm skeptical of the analgesic/anaesthetic properties of many of these. Wikipedia articles on the substances and the references cited here don't back up these claims. Are antiinflammatories also being counted as anaesthetics/analgesics? Poison hemlock apparently was used for arthritis; antiinflammatory, perhaps. However, the coniine article doesn't even mention that. Castoreum was used for headaches. Analgesic, possibly. One of the references for Saussaurea calls it analgesic. I'm taking the Argyreia out altogether. The reference looks at antiinflammatory and anti-arthritic activity only.192.104.39.2 (talk) 19:21, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
