/oss/taxonomy/term/2693/all en /oss/article/drugs-health-history/what-natural-substance-was-first-local-anesthetic-be-introduced-medicine <p style="text-align:justify">Cocaine. Credit for the discovery of cocaine as a local anesthetic is usually attributed to Dr. Carl Koller, an Austrian opthamologist who in 1884 demonstrated that dropping a solution of cocaine into the eyes of frogs and guinea pigs produced a local anesthetic effect. He then went on to experiment on some of his colleagues and on himself, clearly proving that cocaine drops effectively desensitized the eye. While Koller was the first to use cocaine as an anesthetic in eye surgery, he was not the first to note the local anesthetic effect of the compound that occurs naturally in the leaves of the south American coca plant. That honour actually goes to Friedrich Wohler, the German chemist who is regarded as the father of modern organic chemistry. Wohler had garnered scientific fame by making urea, a compound found in human urine, from ingredients that did not come from living sources. With this single experiment he destroyed the notion that substances found in living systems, which at the time were referred to as “organic,” could not be reproduced in the laboratory because they contained some sort of “vital force.”</p> <p><a href="http://blogs.mcgill.ca/oss/2013/05/06/what-natural-substance-was-the-first-local-anesthetic-to-be-introduced-into-medicine">Read more</a></p> Mon, 06 May 2013 21:55:21 +0000 Joe Schwarcz PhD 1933 at /oss