Complete passage: Anaesthesia in any part of the body means a loss of sensation, either permanent or temporary. The term is usually used to describe the artificially produced loss of sensation which makes a surgical operation painless. There are four main types of anaesthesia: general, spinal, regional, and local. Anaesthesia may be given as gases, by inhalation; or as drugs injected into a vein. A patient given general anaesthesia loses consciousness. Anaesthesia of a fairly large area of the body results from injecting the anaesthetic drug into the spinal canal: all that portion of the body below the level at which the drug is injected is anaesthetized. Regional anaesthesia is the injecting of the anaesthetic into the region of a nerve trunk: the anaesthesia induced by this method affects only that area of the body supplied by those nerves. In local anaesthesia, the drug is injected directly at the site of the operative incision and sometimes also into the nearby surrounding tissues. Formerly the most commonly used local anaesthetic was cocaine, a drug extracted from the leaves of the coca bush and introduced in 1879. But cocaine has some disadvantages and, sometimes, undesirable side-effects. For spinal, regional and local anaesthesia, procaine, or one of the several modifications of procaine, is now widely used instead of cocaine. For very limited and short operations, such as opening a small abscess, local anaesthesia may be induced by spraying rather than injecting a chemical, ethyl chloride, on a small area of the skin; in changing from the liquid to the gaseous state, this drug freezes the area sprayed, and permits painless incision. Question: An 'abscess' is

1. a collection of poisonous matter in a hole in the body
2. an open wound requiring surgery
3. a deep hole
4. an operative incision