Anesthesia ─ The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness

An astounding work of nonfiction illuminating a crucial element of modern medicine that works for reasons barely understood—even by expert practitioners. Anesthesia leavens science with personal experience, and brings an intensely human curiosity to the unknowable realm beyond consciousness.

Anesthetize: to render insensible. First there's the injection, then counting backwards from ten—and suddenly, you're awake. Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness is the story of the time in-between, an exploration of that baffling gift of modern medicine: the disappearing act that enables us to undergo procedures which would otherwise be impossibly, often fatally, painful. It is among the most crucial and baffling gifts of modern medicine.

In the past 150 years, anesthesia has made surgical intervention routine, from open-heart surgery to the facelift. But how much do anesthesiologists really know about what happens when their patients go under? Can we hear and retain what's going on? Is pain still pain if we don't remember it? How does the unconscious mind deal with the body's experience of being sliced open and ransacked—and how can we help ourselves through it all?

Kate Cole-Adams—a Melbourne-based novelist and journalist—spent more than a decade researching and writing Anesthesia. She interweaves her exploration with personal accounts—of patients who wake up under the knife, of traumatic reactions, hallucinations, and submerged memories—that evoke the complexities of dreaming and the provisional nature of the self.

Haunting, lyrical, sometimes shattering, Anesthesia leavens science with personal experience, and brings an intensely human curiosity to the unknowable realm beyond consciousness.

KATE COLE-ADAMS is a journalist and novelist. Her debut novel, Walking to the Moon, was published in 2008. She lives in Melbourne with her family.