ANAESTHETICS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 255, 25 September 1935, Page 12

ANAESTHETICS.

HOW SCIENCE HAS PROGRESSED.

Progress in the science of anaesthetics in the 11 years since the death of Dr. Edward Henry Embley, who had made anaesthetics his special subject of study, was described by tlie senior anaesthetist and lecturer on anaesthetics of St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, Dr. Z. Mennell, in the second Embley memorial lecture at the 8.11. A. Conference in Melbourne. One of the most remarkable recent practices, he said, was the use of anaesthetics which would maintain a patient in a deep unconsciousness for eight or nine hours. The next step was to accelerate operations which at present required such a long time. The long periods were used in operations upon the brain which occupied some modern surgeons from six to nine hours. He had, however, administered anaesthetics for six cerebral operations in one day, and none of them had occupied more than an hour. That aecelebration, he believed, was a modern and necessary tendency. The same applied in a less degree to general surgery, in spite of the present popularity of “slow motion” surgery. Dr Mennell discussed the many methods of anaesthesia by inhalation and injection which had followed chloroform, and he praised the boldness and conviction with which Em-* bley had announced the results of his researches, which, it was added, were opposed to much of the established opinion of his day, although Inter experience had proved that he had been right. His researches into the. cause ■of death in chloroform anaesthesia had saved thousands of lives since the results were announced in 1902. After discussing the recent movement to introduce .an anaesthetic which may be administered safely in childbirth by a midwife in the absence of the doctor, Dr Mennell said: “There is now a bewildering multiplicity of methods of producing anaesthesia. Emblev’s plant has become a shrub—one which wants pruning. The undergrowth is overgrown, but the main branches show a healthy growth, and the fruit it bears is. already of great assistance to mankind. What this shrub really wants is attention to the roots—more of the spade work put in by a man like Embley, the physiologist, to determine the exact action of all those drugs and to tell us the nature of this condition which we know as anaesthesia.”