[Report in regard to the discovery of anaesthesia].

  • United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Anaesthesia.
Date:
[1854]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [Report in regard to the discovery of anaesthesia]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    Letheon Anodynes used by the Ancients. Intense pain is regarded by mankind, generally, as so serious an evil that it would have been strange indeed if efforts had not been early made to diminish this species of suffering. The use of the juice of the poppy, henbane, mandragora, and other narcotic preparations, to effect this object by their deadening influence, may be traced back till it disappears in the darkness of a highly remote antiquity. Intoxicating vapors were also employed, by way of inhalation, to produce the same effects as drugs of this nature introduced into the stomach. This appears from the ac- count given by Herodotus, of the practice of the Scythians, seve- ral centuries before Christ, of using the vapor of hemp seed as a means of drunkenness. The known means of stupefaction were very early resorted to, in order to counteract pain produced by artificial causes. In executions, under the horrible form of cruci- fixion, soporific mixtures were administered to alleviate the pangs of the victim. The draught of vinegar and gall, or myrrh, offered to the Savior in his agony, was the ordinary tribute of human sympathy extorted from the bystander by the spectacle of intole- rable anguish. That some letheon anodyne might be found to assuage the tor- ment of surgical operations as they were anciently performed, cauterizing the cut surfaces, instead of tying the arteries, was not only a favorite notion, but it had been in some degree, how- ever imperfect, reduced to practice. Pliny, the naturalist, who perished in the eruption of Vesuvius, which entombed the city of Herculaneum, in the year 79, bears distinct and decided testi- mony to this fact. It has a soporific power, says he in his description of the plant known as the mandragora or circeius, It has a soporific power on the faculties of those who drink it. The ordinary potion is half a cup. It is drunk against serpents, and before cuttings and puncturings, lest they should be felt. {Bibitur et contra serpenles, et ante sectiones, punctionesque, ne senlianlur.) When he comes to speak of the plant eruca, called by us the rocket, he informs us that its seeds, when drunk, infused in wine, by criminals about to undergo the lash, produce a certain cal- lousness or induration of feeling, {duaitiam quondam contra sen- sum induerc.) Pliny also asserts that the stone Memphitis, powdered and ap- plied in a liniment with vinegar, will stupefy parts to be cut or cauterized, for it so paralyzes the part that it feels no pain; nec tentit cruciatum Antiquity of AncBStliesia. Dioscorides, a Greek physician of Cilicia, in Asia, who was born about the time of Pliny's death, and who wrote an exten- sive work on the materia medica, observes, in his chapter on mandragora—