[Anesthesia as a prerequisite for success in surgery].

After a relatively slow development until World War II anaesthesia converted rapidly from an entirely empirical and technically oriented application to an independent clinical and scientific discipline. Statistics confirm safety of today's anaesthesia in spite of the enormous spread of indications for surgery. Further progress is necessary. As an outlook the new method of closed-loop feed-back control of depth of anaesthesia has been described which may be expected to be introduced clinically in the near future.