ANAESTHESIA USE

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20065, 11 October 1939, Page 2

ANAESTHESIA USE

RECORD OF PROGRESS INCREASED SAFETY USE OF NARCOTICS LONDON, Aug. G. Probably the two outstanding advances in surgery during the last 100 years have been the discovery and practice of anaesthesia and antisepsis. Separately and together they have probably been the means of saving more lives than have been lost in all the wars since their advent. Antisepsis, by recognising and combating the cause of local suppuration —the dread sequel of so many earlier operations—opened up vast new possibilities for surgical treatment and cures. Anaesthesia, by abolishing pain and securing muscular and tissue relaxation. enabled the most prolonged and delicate operations to be undertaken. Speed no longer became the first essential of surgery. Just as the name anaesthesia was coined by an American, Oliver Wendell Holmes, so were anaesthetics, in the practical modern sense, a gift from the New World. It was under ether, in America, that the first major operations, in painless conditions, were conducted in 184 G, and within a few months the example had been followed in England. Arrival of Chloroform Later, thanks chiefly to James Young Simpson, of Edinburgh, chloroform was added to the armoury of anaesthetics: and since then there have been various modifications and combinations of both, together with an increased use for minor operations of what was originally known as “laughing gas,” now generally used in combination with oxygen. -Later still various preparations, chiefly with a cocaine or cocainederivative basis, began to be used as local anaesthetics, these having the power of depriving relatively small areas of the skin and underlying tissues of sensibility for brief but, 'in many cases, sufficient periods. It was, then found, again chiefly as the result of pioneer work in America, that large areas of the body could be anaesthetised by injecting certain of these substances into the spinal canal, and many extensive operations upon the 10-v?'er parts of the body have been conducted under this spinal anaesthesia. Again, what is known as regional anaesthesia—-the isolating from painful sensations of an. area of the body by establishing a ring of locally anaesthetised nerves, has made possible some of the very prolonged operations involved in present-day brain surgery. Surgeons’ Preference Nevertheless, it is probably true to say that most surgeons prefer, whenever possible, to use a -general anaesthetic; and an immense amount of work has -been done in making the reception of this, and the recovery from it, pleasant to the patient. Thus, it is now usual, two or three hours before an operation, for an injection of some narcotic to be given. This induces an agreeable sleepiness to the extent that the patient may scarcely be aware, when his turn for operation has come, and hardly conscious, when the time arrives, that he is inhaling the subsequent general anaesthetic. Nowadays, too, though the main anaesthetic may be other or chloroform, it is generally ushered in with gas or gas and oxygen, \yhich are much pleasanter to inhale. Not only is the modern practice of anaesthesia a good deal safer than the old, but it has eliminated almost, every factor that can alarm or distress the recipient