Making anaesthesia safer by tracking brain activity

Watching the waves AROUND 1936 three neurologists at Harvard Medical School raided the medicine cabinet, filling their boots with morphine, barbiturates, ethers and even cobra venom. They injected those substances into (apparently) willing volunteers and cemented primitive electrodes to their scalps and earlobes. They also collared a drunk and wired him up. With pen and paper, they then recorded how the electrical signals in their volunteers' brains changed as the drugs began to take hold. This ...