Henry Jay Przybylo, “Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia” (W.W. Norton, 2017)

New Books in Literature · Mar 7, 2018 · 1h

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of anesthesia in the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 to today’s routine procedures that controls anxiety, memory formation, pain relief, and more, anesthesia has come a long way. But it remains one of the most extraordinary, unexplored corners of the medical world. In Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia (W. W. Norton and Company, 2017), Dr. Henry Jay Przybylo—a pediatric anesthesiologist with more than…