Local anæsthesia in general medicine and surgery : being the practical application of the author's recent discoveries / By J. Leonard Corning.

  • James Leonard Corning
Date:
1886
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Local anæsthesia in general medicine and surgery : being the practical application of the author's recent discoveries / By J. Leonard Corning. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    a circumscribed insensible spot may sometimes be produced. But this is not anaesthesia in the proper sense of the word, since the anaesthetic spot persists for many days, and is therefore owing to permanent destructive tissue-changes inaugurated by the drug. The severe pain often felt on making such injections is also corroborative of these destructive effects. Ke- cently I have taken the opportunity of testing the effects of alcohol and chloroform when injected sub- cutaneously ; but, as far as any pronounced local an- aesthesia was concerned, my experiments were wholly negative.* It is not surprising that, having succeeded in pro- ducing a condition of anaesthesia dependent upon un- consciousness—upon an irreceptive condition of the sensorium to peripheral impressions—the thought of producing anaesthesia by abolishing conduction in the sensory nerves, by suitable means, should have been rife in the minds of progressive physicians. Ac- cordingly, we find Nunnely, of Leeds, endeavoring to produce local anaesthesia by the aid of chloroform. Indeed, he even went so far as to claim that he had succeeded in rendering a finger and an eye sufficient- ly anaesthetic for the execution of a surgical opera- tion. Simpson, on the contrary, was not encouraged by certain endeavors in the same direction; and as for myself, I am entirely satisfied of the inevitable futility of all such attempts, for the reasons already given. The discovery, then, of some substance which, * See letter from the author contained in the New York Medical Journal for September 26, 1885.
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