How it began
Carl Koller and Sigmund Freud became friends as medical students in Vienna and experimented on themselves with cocaine, then studied as a new wonder drug. Freud thought it would be an ideal cure for morphine addiction. Koller noted its numbing effect. In 1884 Koller, then a young and unknown ophthalmologist in Vienna, placed a cocaine solution on the eye and found that it worked as a local anesthetic.
How it spread
On September 18, 1884, Koller published a paper describing cocaine as the first local anesthetic. News of the paper spread around the world and ophthalmologists praised it at once. Koller moved to New York in 1888 and later became chief of the ophthalmology department at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Who pushed back
Many historians have speculated that Freud was unhappy to see his own findings on cocaine overshadowed by Koller's article. The American Academy of Ophthalmology notes that later letters show the friendship was undamaged, and that Freud nicknamed his friend "Coca Koller."
What lasted
A PubMed-indexed history states that modern local anesthesia began with Koller's discovery in 1884. At a conference in Heidelberg in 1885, a Dr. Knapp toasted Koller and called his work "the greatest gift we had received for many years." Koller received the Adolf Kussmaul medal in 1902, was the first recipient of the Lucien Howe Medal of the American Ophthalmological Society in 1922, and received a New York Academy of Medicine medal in 1930.
