James Robinson

James Robinson (22 November 1813 – 4 March 1862) was a British dentist and anaesthetist. On 19 December 1846, he became the first person to carry out general anaesthesia in Britain when he administered ether to a patient undergoing a tooth extraction. The next year, he published A Treatise on the Inhalation of the Vapour of Ether, perhaps the first textbook of anaesthesia. Robinson's work influenced the prominent anaesthetist John Snow. Robinson also undertook initiatives to reform the dental profession in Britain. At the age of 48, he died of blood loss following a gardening accident; his London home, as well as the site where he first administered anaesthesia, are commemorated with plaques. Biography Robinson was born on 22 November 1813 in Hampshire, England. At 14, he undertook an apprenticeship with a surgeon and chemist in London, and beginning in 1830 he attended medical courses at Guy's Hospital and University College. He did not complete his studies or obtain any official qualifications, but he began practising dentistry in London as early as 1833, and became surgeon dentist at the Metropolitan Hospital the next year. Early in his career Robinson made efforts to reform the—then largely unregulated and disreputable—dental profession in Britain. In 1842 he established a professional society for "ethical" dentists, but this initiative attracted little support. Robinson also founded two short-lived dental journals, the British Quarterly Journal of Dental Surgery and The Forceps, in 1843 and 1844 respectively—the Quarterly was the first dental journal in Britain—and in 1846 he published a textbook of dentistry, The Surgical and Mechanical Treatment of the Teeth. Robinson quickly earned an international reputation as a skilled dentist, and the Baltimore College of Dental Surgeons awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1846.