ANAESTHESIA IN SURGERY.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18844, 6 April 1931, Page 5

ANAESTHESIA IN SURGERY.

NEW METHODS CONQUER PAIN. There are many people who still regard a surgical operation with apprehension, if not actually with horror. They carry on the tradition of those days when there was no anaesthetic, and when it was as necessary for the surgeon to be callous as it was for his patients to be brave. They imagine the cold, grim, forbidding aspect of an operating theatre, and even though they are aware of the use of anaesthetics, this betokens to them only the sickly and stifling inhalation of something which brings unconsciousness, but not without a struggle. These people must be reassuredThey are as little justified in their fears, and as far behind the times, as they would be if they were afraid of highwaymen when they propose to take a motor ride in the country. There is, of course, no need nowadays to see the operating theatre at all when you are about to be the centre of its activity, and the unpleasantness of entering into unconsciousness through an anaesthetic has been banished by modern improvements. The progress which has been so rapid during recent years in all activities dependent on natural science had naturally appeared also in connection with the administration of anaesthetics. Mechanical devices have almost completely changed the methods of administration, while chemical discoveries have added new agents which bid fair completely to oust ether, as, indeed, the more dangerous chloroform has already been almost completely ousted. These advances, which have been made along the lines of physical and chemical investigations, would hardly have been possible, it is only right to add, without the aid of animal experiments. The trying out of new anaesthetic agents cannot be safely and scientifically carried out by the anaesthetist on his own person, although more than one life has been sacrificed in the endeavour. At the expense of the lives, painlessly purchased, of a few guinea-pigs discoveries are made which help to preserve from pain and from death human beings who have to undergo operations. Anti-vivisectionists may object to the methods—the only possible methods —by which anaesthetics have been raised to their present position, but they share the advantages with the subjects of operation. What are the advantages now open to us? In the first place the fear and mental disquiet which naturally as--1 sail a nervous person before an operaI tion are now groundless, and will not arise when the patient is handled with tact and skill. For all that he will have to endure is a trifling injection made while he lies comfortably in his bed. A pleasant sleepiness follows rapidlj’, and from then onwards life is a blank to the patient until he wakes up again in bed after the operation is over. During that blank he has been taken to the operating theatre, a gaseous anaesthetic has been continuously given to him, keeping him asleep, relaxed, and amenable to all the manipulations of the surgeon, and he has been escorted back to bed and left safely in the nurses’ hands by the anaesthetist, who has been safeguarding him throughout. When he awakes he will remember only the original injection. He will probably have lost all sense of time, and after inquiries about this and his operation he will probably go off to sleep again. Thus in a kind of mental haze, and without pain or discomfort, the first few hours after operation are passed over. In some instances the procedure will have involved no giving of any further general anaesthetic after the first injection. Unconsciousness persisting from this will have been supplemented by local injections at the site of operation, or by an injection paralysing the sensory nerves where they emerge from the spinal cord. In these instances no after-sickness at all is the rule. In the others there may be some nausea or actual sickness or pain demanding treatment, but the violent and prolonged disturbances which were common a few years ago are now a rarity. It may have been true at that time, as Mr Bernard Shaw declared, that “anaesthetics spare us nothing but the actual cutting.” The criticism to-day would be quite unjustified. It would I be with greater truth replaced by the | observation of another great writer, I George Meredith, who spoke of “the beatitudes of anaesthetics.”