Volume 1

Account of a new anaesthetic agent, as a substitute for sulphuric ether in surgery and midwifery / [Sir James Young Simpson].

  • Simpson, James Young, 1811-1870
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Account of a new anaesthetic agent, as a substitute for sulphuric ether in surgery and midwifery / [Sir James Young Simpson]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/34 (page 8)
    evaporating, and possessing an agreeable, fragrant, fruit-like odour, and a saccharine pleasant taste. As an inhaled anesthetic agent, it possesses over sulphuric Ether the following advantages :— « 1. A. greatly less quantity of Chloroform than of Kither is requisite to produce the anesthetic effect ; usually from a hundred to a hundred and twenty . drops of Chloroform only being sufficient; and with some patients much less: [ have seen a strong per- son rendered completely insensible by six or seven inspirations of thirty drops of the liquid. 2. Its action is much more rapid and complete, and generally more persistent. [I have almost always seen from ten to twenty full- inspirations suffice. Hence the time of the surgeon is saved; and that preliminary stage of excitement, which pertains to all narcotizing agents, being curtailed, or indeed practically abolished, the patient has not the same degree of tendency to exhilaration and talking.* * In practice I have found that any such tendency, even with ether, is avoided by, Ist, giving the patient from the first a large and over- whelming dose of the vapour, and 2ndly, by keeping him perfectly quiet and still, and. preventing all noise and talking around him. I have elsewhere insisted on the importance of these points. (See the numbers of the Monthly Jowrnal of Medical. Science for March, 1847, p. 726, and for September, p. 154)... In the paper last re-