author
Henry Hill Hickman
1800–1830
A young English physician remembered as an early champion of pain-free surgery, he pursued the radical idea that operations might be done without suffering long before modern anaesthesia became established. His short life left a lasting place in medical history.
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About the author
Born near Ludlow in Shropshire on January 27, 1800, Henry Hill Hickman studied medicine in Edinburgh and London and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1820. He worked as a country doctor in the English Midlands and quickly became known for an unusually bold medical idea.
In the 1820s, Hickman argued that surgery might be carried out without pain if patients were placed in what he called “suspended animation,” using gases to reduce suffering during operations. His experiments and pamphlets did not win broad acceptance in his lifetime, but later writers and medical historians came to see him as an important early pioneer in the story of anaesthesia.
Hickman died in Paris on April 2, 1830, when he was only 30 years old. Even so, his name endured because he had tried to solve one of medicine’s oldest and hardest problems: how to spare patients the agony of surgery.