The Aragonese military physician Fidel Pagés Miravé published in May 1921 the first illustrated technical treatise on epidural anesthesia: "Anestesia metamérica," in which he precisely described injecting anesthetic into the epidural space without piercing the spinal cord, allowing specific areas of the body to be anesthetized while keeping the patient conscious. He died in a traffic accident in 1923, before his method could be internationally disseminated. The Italian Achille Dogliotti published a similar description in 1931 and received historical credit for decades. The recovery of Pagés's precedence was documented by medical historiography starting in the 1980s. The epidural is today the most widely used analgesic method in the world for childbirth and abdominal surgery.