Did you know that cocaine has a long history of being used therapeutically in medicine?
In the 1880s,
ophthalmologist Carl Koller recognized that there was a lack of
good anesthetic options for his eye surgery patients.
He was inspired by his mentor Sigmund Freud’s obsession with cocaine,
so he decided to try injecting it
locally and…ta-da! This drug does temporarily blocks nerve signals from the affected area,
which made it the ideal turn of the century surgery breakthrough. We now use other, safer
anesthetics for routine procedures, but if you want to learn more about how cocaine was used this
year, in 2022, for a groundbreaking new procedure, subscribe to Seeker and check out the full episode.