Long and his discovery / by I.H. Goss.

  • Goss, I. H. (Isham Hamilton), 1853-1921.
Date:
[1908?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Long and his discovery / by I.H. Goss. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    BY I. H. GOSS, M. D., ATHENS, GA. We have been taught that medical operations have been tem¬ pered by forms of anesthesia “since the days whereof the mem¬ ory of man runneth not to the contrary.” The suggestion has been made that the “deep sleep” that the Creator “caused to fall upon Adam” was the germ idea of anesthesia. There are tra¬ ditions that the Assyrians employed digital compression of the carotid arteries to produce anaesthesia; also that the Egyp¬ tian used Indian hemp and the juice of the poppy to cause drowsiness before surgical operations. The Odyssey informs us that a “sorrow easing drug” was given by Helen to Ulysses. The younger Pliny describes the use of mandragora as a narcotic, and Galen speaks of its power to paralvze sensation. In the twelfth-century in Celtic manuscript on materia medica mention is made of a draught which was used by the early Irish to induce sleep; and in the fifteenth cen¬ tury, on occasions of surgical operations, patients were put to sleep by means of that which was termed “The Sleeping Sponge.” Reginald Scott, in the sixteenth century, wrote of an anaesthetic made of opium, mandragora bark, and henbane root; and Shake¬ speare’s references to “drowsy syrups” are proverbial. Opium as an anaesthetic—both by inhalation and by internal administra- titon—is declared to have been used in the eighteenth century, and during the same period other means of producing insensibili¬ ty were suggested. It were a work of supererogation for me to remind this dis¬ tinguished presence of the brilliant discoveries in chemistry which created a new epoch in the history of anaesthesia; first, the dis¬ covery of Priestly, which led to administering gases and vapors by inhalation; then followed the experiments of Beddoes; the re¬ searches of Humphrey Davy on nitrous oxide; the inhalation of sulphuric ether, by Woolcombe, of Plymouth; and the conclu¬ sion of Faraday, in 1818, that the vapor of sulphuric ether pro¬ duced similar effects to those caused by nitrous oxide. All of these valuable discoveries are now as a tale oft told, as is also the fact that Professor Thompson, of Glasgow, amused his stu¬ dents by occasionally permitting them to inhale ether and ni¬ trous oxide until they became unconscious and appeared to be insensible to pain. Says a well-known writer upon the subject of anaesthesia: “It is extraordinary that among all the investigators who for