PAINLESS SURGERY

Northern Advocate, 20 February 1926, Page 2

PAINLESS SURGERY

MODERN METHODS. The surgery of a century ago was a painful and almost brutal procedure. With the coming of antisepsis and later of asepsis, following the work of Lister and Pasteur, the mortality whie'h resulted from surgery was greatly reduced through the elimination of bacterial infection following operation. With the development of anaethesia, beginning with the work of Morton and Long on ether, .and following with chloroform, nitrous oxid-oxygen, > gas, stovain and intraspinal anaesthesia, the use of narcotics preliminary to operation to reduce the patient's sensibility,--I and, more recently, the development of another gas anaesthetic, ethylene, physicians have been able to work more slowly, more carefully and more accurately, extending surgical procedures to orgaais heretofore unapproachable by the surgeon's knife, therebp saving many lives in conditions previously called inoperable. . Moreover, continued study of nerve routes and nerve paths, with the development of anaesthetic. substances ! which may be applied directly t'o nerves, permits effectively blocking the sens'© of pain which may proceed along the nerves to the brain. So-called local anaesthesia with such drugs as proeain and butyn enables surgeons to operateon patients who are fully conscious, and therefore are better able to resist the shock which may accompany extensive operative measures. Whereas operations were formerly limited to amputation, or to the hasty removal of such diseased tissues as an inflamed appendix or of a gangrenous ovary, the modern surgeon enters the abdomen for the removal of masses, of. diseased tissue, of great weight. He performs plastic operations within the abdomen, removing whole sections of the bowel, parts of the stomach, and such organs as the kidney, spleen or gall bladder.

Studies of the physical mechanisms involved in breathing, with the construction of- adequate pressure chambers, permit operation within the chest cavity, and quite recently investigators in Boston were able to introduce a tube directly into a beating heart and to _ ; cut one of the valves which had been so constricted by disease ias to menace a child's life.

The brain, practically unapproachable in a previous century, is now the subject of operations or the removal of tumor, for the relief of abscess, and for other conditions which formerly meant certain death. Indeed, here diagnosis includes (photography of the structure of the brain, accurate measurements of the pressure within the brain, and careful neurologic tests o£ sensation and function of parts far removed from the brain, by which it is possible to localise, almost to a hair's breadth, growths within the brain before the skull is opened. These marvels of scientific, surgery are again not theory, but operations

I that have been performed and scienl finally recorded. —"Scientific Amei J can.''