Anesthesia as pain relief is amazing, and we still have trouble understanding how it really works. What we do know is that it has played an important role in medicine for centuries. This role was made uncomfortably clear to me more than 35 years ago when I had to perform an emergency cesarean section on a woman using lidocaine as my only anesthetic. There was no anesthesiologist available for this 2 a.m. emergency, and this was before the days of routine epidurals. I was much younger then and was only one year out of training, and the parents wanted everything done for their baby. We rushed her back to the operating room, hoping the anesthesiologist would show up in time before I had to cut. There was only one anesthesiologist in the hospital in the middle of the night. He was on another case where the patient was actually coding …