“TEA, PLEASE AND LEG OFF"

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 June 1912, Page 8

“TEA, PLEASE AND LEG OFF"

SOME OF THE WONDERFUL NEW ANAESTHETICS SURGEONS are USING.

The latest sensation of the medical world is the new anaesthetic hedonal. It is the safest of all anaesthetics, with the possible exception of gas. The death which took place in a London children's hospital recently is the only one yet recorded, and the patient was doomed to death before the drug was administered.

Hedonal has no had aiter-affects. Ifc injected in a vein of tire left leg and drowsy sleep. sends the patient off into a pleasant, drowsy sleep. Some of the most interesting discoveries of modern medical science lie in the direction of anaesthetics. New drugs for making operations painless are continually being invented, and some of them have very curious properties.

With one of the latest, scopomaline, the operation\haj> to be earned through in absolute silence- The patient’s body is quite insensible to pain, but his mind is only drowsy. If a loud word, were spoken or an instrument hastily thrown aside after use in the ordinary way, the patient would wake, and this waking would weaken the effect of the drug on his body. Under this curious anaesthetic a loud tone will wake a man when sharp knives and saws fail to. One great merit of this anaesthetic is that it is not followed by violent sickness as most anaesthetics are. The patient often sleeps on for live ~r six h mrs, wakes up hungry, able to take nourishing food, and' then goes off to si *ep again. DOESN’T AFFECT NEGROES. Two other interesting points about this anaesthetic are the fact Dial for some reason, it is almost useless . n the case, of negroes. A thumbful would send a thousand white men to sleep. A new method of making the patient insensible does not require a drug at all. Professor Bennrd of Geneva, lias recently discovered that a strong blue light is sufficient for short operations. A blue electric hand-lamp with a reflector is directed towards the patient’s eye, and the whole, head and lamp, too, covered with a blue gauze veil to prevent white light from trickling in. The undiluted blue light seems to dumb the nerve of sight and the paralysing effect extends to the other nerves of the body. Many of the less important operations are carried on thus nowadays, particularly in Switzerland and Germany. A few' years ago an anesthetic was discovered which created a sensation in the medical world. Stovaine is the name by .which it is known.

The curious thing about Stovaine is that by injecting it with a needle in the lower part of the spine the whole of the body below the heart is made absolutely dead to pain, while all above the heart is wide awake as usual. So it is used only for operations on the lower half of the body. A screen is placed across the patient’s chest so that he cannot see what is happening at his other end. At hospital operations, in order to show the students how completely well the top half of the patient feels it is quite common for the operation sni’geon to glahce over the screen and ask : “Like a cjip of tea? Cup of tea, please, nurse!” TAKING THE TEA DURING OPERATION.

And there the patient lies drinking tea, sometimes with a broad smile on bis face, while his toes or legs are being swiftly amputated. Under gas (its medical name is nitrous oxide) duly one patient, it has been estimated, dies out of every quarter of a million operated on. Only thirty-five deaths, indeed, have been known to take place. Under ether the death-rate is one Kin ten thousand. Chloroform is fatal to one in eve 17 thousand or so, but nowadays chloroform and either are usually blended and the mixture forms a very safe anaesthetic. It is interesting:! to note that that great stand-by of the sensational storywriter, the chloroformed handkerchief which immediately produces unconsciousness is laughed at by the medical profession. Chloroform takes five or ten minutes to make a man unconscious. During that time fresh supplies are constantly needed. And if the patient really struggled no doctor ,in the world could put him under, even with ample supplies of the drug. &> the chloroformed handkerchief should cease to be part of the novelist’s stock-in-trade.