President's address : delivered ... at the 1930 United States Pharmacopoeial Convention ... in Washington, D.C / [Reid Hunt].

  • Hunt, Reid, 1870-1948
Date:
[1930]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: President's address : delivered ... at the 1930 United States Pharmacopoeial Convention ... in Washington, D.C / [Reid Hunt]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    thesia could have been discovered; nitrous oxide, ethylene, chloroform, ethyl chloride and bromide and acetylene were all well-known chemi¬ cals at that time. The subject of surgical anesthesia was often treated as if it were a closed chapter; but steady progress is being made, as shown by the recent introduction or re-introduction of ethylene, and of various new local anesthetics, as well as of new general anesthetics. But the ques¬ tion should be seriously considered if man has even got on the right track in regard to general anesthesia. The effective anesthetic dose of the present general anesthetics is more than 50 per cent of the fatal dose—a smaller margin of safety than with any other class of im¬ portant drugs. The essential action of anesthetics seems to be the blocking of the passage of impulses to the brain at certain synapses; impulses coming from the brain to peripheral organs may be blocked by drugs in a thousandth or even millionth of the fatal dose. Another slogan which has done much to retard rational therapeutics is the ‘‘healing power of nature.’’ Nature is certainly not very active in healing cancer, syphilis, tetanus, amebic dysentery, yaws, diabetes, myxedema, hookworm and many other diseases, many of which may now be relieved or cured by drugs. There is truth in Benjamin Rush’s famous remark that Nature should be turned out of doors and efficient art substituted for her. Not only can the introduction of almost every modern drug into medicine be traced straight back to pharmacological experiments, but the rational use of some of the older remedies is almost wholly de¬ pendent upon such experiments. Even the underlying pathological conditions have often been elucidated by such work. Tomorrow will be the twenty-fourth anniversary of the presentation to a medical association meeting in this hotel of a paper by two modest pharma¬ cologists (the late Professor Cushny, and Edmunds, whom we have with us today) in which an explanation was offered for the first time of the condition (auricular fibrillation) in which digitalis produces its most spectacular results. These pharmacologists were also largely responsible for the intro¬ duction into medicine of physiological standardization. Other pharma¬ cologists, especially Hatcher and Eggleston, developed the subject farther and have done much to place digitalis therapy upon a firm