Gordon Edwards: The Main Who Conquered Pain

Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 1164, 3 November 1917, Page 6 (Supplement)

Gordon Edwards: The Main Who Conquered Pain

(<3y£H^\ NE day in San Francisco a young American engineer heard some doctors lamenting that there existed no perfeet anaesthetic for dentistry. The rwP. JTu reniai 'k made him pause and think. Like most people, he had more or less unconsciously assumed that there were three or four available. If what the doctors said was true, there were fame and fortune both awaiting the successful investigator. He began to work in a laboratory. Choosing the most promising of the known analgesic substances, he set to work to evolve some substitute for cocaine. Cocaine is dangerous. It allays pain —but too often permanently. It was necessary to iind something capable of producing analgesia without endangering the patient's life. War descended on the world and found Gordon Edwards still searching. Then a remarkable thing happened. Six weeks after the outbreak of war, Edwards was sitting in the Red Cross office in New York among the bustle of helpers preparing to leave for France. Should he join them, or return to his ruinous experiments—or give it all up and go back to engineering and dollars? . . , Instead, he went suddenly back to his rooms, trembling with excitement, but exalted by a sudden certainty of success. It had come to him in a flash what was wrong with his solution.

Two months later he had landed in England. And England, of course, had no time to listen to him. He was not a doctor, and he was indubitably an American. London was too busy. He went to Paris. Officialdom was very busy again. By a lucky encounter he almost convinced an eminent surgeon that he was neither a bounder nor a quack. And he did finally convince himself that his solution would stand all tests. Yet nearly two years went past before he succeeded in interesting authority long enough to demonstrate that, if only his method were given a legitimate trial, it would mean the saving of thousands of lives. Success came at last at Verdun. Edwards arrived there one evening in the midst of the ghastly slaughter. Never was brought together a more terrible collection of maimed, charred, and mangled living bodies than the one in the operating room the following morning. The surgeons, used to the worst, grew pale at the sight of some of the cases. Edwards, the layman, had never imagined anything so awful. Twice during the mornings work he nearly fainted; but he did not faint. "This Frightful Ruin." After a few comparatively simple cases the attendants wheeled forward a closelyswathed figure half upright in a chair. It was a victim of liquid fire. The head was almost entirely enveloped in gauze. One hand and arm had been burned black, and they, too, were partly covered with white bandages. But there was worse. The victim had been struck in the chest by the fluid, and the result surpassed Dante's imaginings. A sheet of gauze 18in square covered a burn on the Body that stretched from neck to navel. The outlines of the gaping hole wherein the flesh had been burned away showed through the stuff, which in places was stuck to the ilesh beneath. What one could see of the face, black, spotted with flaming red holes, grey where the flesh had been reduced to a cinder, shocked the spectators almost to nausea. For from out this frightful ruin stared two living eyes! Chance had saved them for the owner, perhaps at the expense of hand and arm. Within that roasted heap of flesh life stirred sluggishly. Suffering had been so intense, shock so unsettling, that the man had been reduced to a half-bestial organisism capable of no sensation but pain. The expression was as vacant as that of an idiot, hiding nothing but fear. For in a dozen places large nerves were completely exposed. The doctors had not dared to put the patient to bed when he arrived the day before. When brought into the operating room he sat propped up on cushions, oblivious to everything but sensation, heedless of everything but the pain that was slowly driving consciousness from the devastated dwelling.

"Now I ask you, Monsieur Edwards," the chief surgeon said slowly, "what can you do with a case like that ? That breast must be dressed or the man will die of poisoning. Yet, with the nerves exposed as they are, if I attempt to remove that apron of gauze stuck to the cooked flesh, he will die of the pain. Can you do anything for him?" "I'll try," Edwards answered, already doubtful of the task. Gently he began to spray the chest, and for fully 10 minutes moistened the gauze, until it dripped with solution. Then, while a nurse gently lifted the bandaged chin until the eyes were fixed on the ceiling, the chief surgeon began at the neck to peel down the gauze, while Edwards never ceased playing a stream of amcslhetic on to the raw flesh. An inch! The surgeon, perspiring, looked quickly at the

patient. He had not moved. Another inch! Emboldened, he stripped away the gauze in a single movement. The strange, frightened eyes had never left the ceiling. The patient fell nothing. He was saved. For if his wounds could be dressed without pain, healing was a mere matter of time. They brought in another soldier. There was a suppurating hole in his thigh a foot long, which necessitated the passing of strips of gauze through the tunnel. The agony was frightful. To-day the soldier had announced that he would die before he would endure a further dressing. "I promise you it will not hurt a bit," Edwards said earnestly. The man looked up. In his eves there was the infinite hostility of the long-deceived sufferer. Yet such was the effect of nikalgin that he permitted the surgeons to cleanse the wound by sawing fresh gauze back and forth through it, and could not believe, until he saw his bandages in position again, that the old ones had been really removed. Success at Last. Leaving with the doctors of the Verdun front

all the solution he had on hand, Edwards returned to England. It was at Manchester a month later that a letter reac-hed him from the chief surgeon of the Second Army asking him to return with more solution at once. The letter continued in what to Edwards seemed immortal words: "Wounds have healed normally without suppuration and with a total absence of all secretion." It was a bombshell. Why, wondered the engineer, had he never followed up the information contained in the first letters from the Russian and Japanese? If nikalgin was good against gas gangrene, if applied in time, it would naturally serve splendidly against ordinary pus! Once more.he met the surgeon inspector. "How much solution have you brought?" asked the latter. "Twenty-five gallons—about a hundred litres." The Frenchman tossed his hands in dismay. 'A hundred litres will last one hospital only ten days. What shall we do when they are gone? What about the other hospitals? We must have enough nikalgin to keep the entire army flooded. Whatever is useful in one military hospital is needed in all of them." Edwards nearly choked with emotion. "I have been waiting two years for someone to say just that. You are the first. I'll not fail you. How. much solution do you require for immediate needs?" "A minimum of five hundred hires, and as much more regularly." "You shall have it as soon as I can get it made up. And from now on I shall keep you supplied." By December, 1916, his solution was in use on the Somme front as well. Aside from the futile attempts of the British War Office to provide

a cheaper substitute, difficulties disappeared one by one. Nikaigin won admission into the great military hospital of Paris, Val de Grace, where an eminent Russian surgeon, a woman, look it up eagerly. During a short visit to the Italian front in May of this year, Edwards gave demonstrations of his discovery in several hospitals, and the product, new to the surgeons, excited their wonder and admiration. Italy's medical men, seemingly less sluggish than those of France and England, are adopting it to-day. The Italian Minister of War has only to ask for it and nikaigin will be sent to Italy free of charge for the duration of the war, as a "gift from the United States." Every day testimonials reach him from the most varied sources. Most of them were written by surgeons, some of whom are world-famous. Some of the letters are from soldiers, and their letters are like tangible prayers, seeming withal to cry out at all who blocked Gordon Edwards.

Edwards's Reward. Edwards to-day, having accepted the burden oi furnishing free of charge two immense armies, is no richer—in fact, he is poorer—than he was when he first began to hunt for an anaesthetic. He has never made one cent. He is at the present moment filling the demands of five of the largest Paris hospitals, and twenty smaller hospitals at Nice, Lyons, and other points. Only the Russian and the new American armies remain to he supplied. Nikalgin can be used for temporary relief and to permit painless dressings of all external wounds. As an antiseptic it has apparently no rival. Tom Foster, a little English soldier, was dying. His leg, amputated at the thigh, was wasting away slowly under an inch of loathsome green pus. A new operation higher up already tempted the surgeons. But Tom preferred to die.

Yet, once the pain was quelled, his cure was so marvellous that Edwards, entering the operating room the third day, found the boy laughingly raising his stump in both hands while the nurse stripped away the bandages. When the flesh finally appeared it was red and clean as a new cut. All infection had disappeared. In a week Tom Foster no longer interested the surgeons. How much of this strange healing power of nikalgih is due to its direct antiseptic powers, how much to natural action marvellously quickened by the suppression of pain, Edwards does not know. Corporal Lespinasse's foot had been carried away by a projectile. Gangrene set in, and his life was despaired of, and dressing his wound had been intolerable for patient and operators alike until Edwards came. During the first painless dressing his eyes sought the American's in mute gratitude, while the nurse, awed by silence when she expected shrieks, had murmured softly over and over: "Ah, doctor, don't you remember how horrible this was yesterday?" . The fourth day Lespinasse walked from the operating room on his own crutches. As Edwards was leaving a few minutes later, the nurse whispered: "Go out this way, monsieur; I think somebody is waiting for you." It was Lespinasse, Seizing Edwards's hand, he kissed it passionately, then in confusion drew himself up with a stiff military salute. When Edwards visited the hospital next day the news had spread, and not a soldier but saluted him as reverently as though he were a general. Light in Darkness. In the preface to "The Doctor's Dilemma," Bernard Shaw has rather more than said his say concerning modern doctors. The story of Gordon Edwards speaks more eloquently than any commentary. Yet there is little ground for resentment, and Edwards feels none. The medical profession "in this war has done its best, and none shall tally its obscure acts of devotion and self-sacrifice. That it has seemed impregnated with prejudice and intolerance lies on ourselves. The doctors are merely a branch of the great tree which is ourselves, at once in our collectivity and in our essence. If they were intolerant toward a great discoverer, "an American and not a physician," it is because humanity lacks tolerance. The war resembles a fever—when it does not kill it purifies. And it reveals like a flash of lightning in dark night, It has shown beyond possibility of doubt that we who were meant to "go dancing through the earth like stars" labour under no luminous comet coma, but dully under a burden of ignorance, prejudice, and ill-will. Yet a little light can illuminate much darkness. The nobility of a great individual glorifies the race as much as the limitations'of an entire nation can abase it. America, entering the war, must not allow the music of the drums, the files, and the bugles to drown the sound of the sufferers.