WAR AGAINST DISEASE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLIX, 14 August 1929, Page 5

WAR AGAINST DISEASE.

NEW ERA OF ANAESTHESIA. GREAT POSSIBILITIES HELD OUT. (Telegraph—Press Association.) AUCKLAND, Aug. 13. Fulfilling part of bis life’s work —a crusade to join all the Englishspeaking people in a unified effort for the conquest of pain—Dr. F_ H. McMechan, Secretary-General of tlie International Anaesthetic Research Society, and a world authority on anaesthesia, arrived in Auckland by the Makura to-day. He will remain in New Zealand about three weeks, and will then go to Australia to attend the medical conference in Sydney. The new era of anaesthesia held the possibility of reducing hospital maintenance costs and wiping out the deficits, he said. Gas oxygen anaesthesia was so rapidly induced and recovery was so rapid that each patient’s stay in hospital was so shortened that 26 per cent, more patients could he operated on in one hospital without adding a bed or a nurse. In maternity hospitals mothers and their babies could be returned home on the sixth or eighth day, instead of after the usual two weeks, and the newer gas era. would tend to wipe out a quarter of the maternal and infantile deathrate.

“Perhaps the most revolutionary field l which the use of anaesthetics and gases is entering to-day is that of the treatment of diseases apart from surgery,” Dr. McMeohan said. “Anaesthesia is being used in the treatment of diseases caused by germs which die in the air, and the use of compressed air is finding an extended use in pneumonia, heart and kidney diseases and burns. It is not even necessary to give oxygen by inhalation. It may be inflated under loose areas of the skin with marked beneficial results. One London surgeon has used this method in his last 200 cases of burns, with remarkably speedy healing.”