You may have heard, it’s our anniversary on the 19th September. We’re so excited that we have decided to take the whole month to celebrate. While there may not be cake every week for five weeks (it’s a long month), there will be a newsletter. Yes, a special 60th Anniversary WFSA Newsletter!

If you’re a follower of our Seasonal Newsletter, you will have a sense of what our newsletters tend to cover, anaesthesia (maybe you didn’t need to be a follower of our Seasonal Newsletter to guess that one). However, with our 60th Anniversary Newsletter we are mixing things up a bit.

There is still a current anaesthesia news focus. In fact there is a whole section entitled ‘Anaesthesia in the News’ which brings together the most interesting news stories from around the internet . We think we’re the only ones doing this right now, so it is definitely worth signing up [http://ow.ly/RNw07] to receive it.

However, the 60th Anniversary Newsletter will also feature lots of fun facts, images and stories about the history of anaesthesia and anaesthesia today. It is designed to be a short and fun addition to your working day, and will hopefully appeal to anaesthesiologists and our wider audience.

With history in mind this month, the WFSA team, with a little bit of help from our friends at the History of Anaesthesia Society, thought about the 6 biggest advances in anaesthesia over the past 60 years.

It was extremely hard to narrow so many innovations down to only six, but here they are:

1950s: Halothane was first used clinically by Dr M. Johnstone in England (1956).

DID YOU KNOW: Halothane is the only inhalational anesthetic containing bromine.

1960s: Brian Arthur Sellick published a paper describing 'cricoid pressure'. The technique is applied during endotracheal intubation, to control regurgitation of stomach contents during induction of anaesthesia (1961).

Look at our Anaesthesia Tutorial of the Week library [http://ow.ly/RNwls] to see how often this technique is used!

1970s: Propofol was formulated (1977).

DID YOU KNOW: Propofol is on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, the most important medications needed in a health system.

1980s: Pulse oximetry, where the patient’s pulse is measured by clipping a devise onto their finger, was introduced(1980).

DID YOU KNOW: In 2011 the WFSA co-founded Lifebox, a charity that provides life-saving pulse oximeters to operating rooms in low-resource settings.

1990s: Ultrasound to determine nerve blocks was used for the first time (1999).

Read Anaesthesia Tutorials of the Week [http://ow.ly/RNwls] to learn more about methods of using ultrasound to manage nerve blocks in different locations.

2000s: The Glidescope become the first commercially available video-laryngoscope.

DID YOU KNOW: The Glidescope Ranger is designed for the Emergency Medical Services to use in pre-hospital airway management in air, land, and sea applications. This device weighs less than 1kg, is completely waterproof and is airworthy to 20,000ft altitude!

What do you think anaesthesiologists and history buffs, did we overlook anything? Let us know in the comments below!

Please keep reading the blog this month as we will be writing about lots of different topics relating to global anaesthesia and the WFSA. We even have a theme in mind for some of it. Since today we listed six innovations, the next blog will look at five of something related to anaesthesia and our work, then four, then three, and so on.