The uses of the methonium compounds : the Bengué memorial award lecture, 1952 / by W.D.M. Paton.

  • Paton, William D. M.
Date:
[1953?]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The uses of the methonium compounds : the Bengué memorial award lecture, 1952 / by W.D.M. Paton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprinted from the Journal of The Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene— February, 1953 THE BENGUE MEMORIAL AWARD LECTURE, i9r2 “ THE USES OF THE METHONIUM COMPOUNDS.” BY W. D. M. PATON, M.A., B.M., B.Ch. (Reader m Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University College and University College Hospital Medical School) In the Chair: F. J. M. BENGUE, Esq., Hon. F.R.LP.H.H. Delivered at the Institute, 15th October, 1952. Dr. Jules Bernard Bengue, in whose memory these lectures were founded, left the ordinary practice of medicine in Paris to take a degree in Chemistry and there¬ after to specialize in the study of anaesthetics. It would surely have pleased him to see how far the synthetic chemist and the pharmacologist are now contributing to his chosen field, not only in local and general anaesthesia and in the creation of analgesics and stimulants, but more recently in the control of respiration and blood-pressure at operation.. In expressing my appreciation, therefore, of the honour of being asked to give this lecture, I must at the same time say how appropriate it seems that a pharmacological subject should be discussed. Indeed I hope to illustrate how chemical and pharmacological studies may assist the progress of anesthesia, as Dr. Bengue foresaw. It is a pleasure, too, to mention another way m which workers in the physiological or pharmacological laboratory are indebted to Dr. Bengue. His ingenious ethychloride spray forms a most convenient and simple means of inducing, in animals, a peaceful and rapid anesthesia ; I imagine that almost every laboratory engaged in this sort of work makes use of his invention. I propose to survey in this talk the uses of a series of chemical compounds called the methonium salts. Recent interest in these compounds began in two independent ways, which I think are worth describing to illustrate some of the factors involved in the origin of a new therapeutic agent. Dr. Ing, at Oxford, who had for long been interested in chemical compounds of this type, particularly in tneii relationship to curare, turned to investigate how far the high activity of d-tubocurarine, one of the chief curare alkaloids, depended on the distance between its two quaternary nitrogen atoms. With his colleague, R. B. Barlow, he prepared a series of bis-quaternary compounds, of various types, which included the methonium series. My own interest arose in the course of some experiments to see whether changing the terminal grouping of di-basic compounds would alter a certain pharmacological property, that of histamine-liberation (Macintosh & Paton, 1949). Among the substances tested was the compound which we now call C 8 or octamethonium. Its unexpectedly powerfully paralyzing properties, to¬ gether with some very intriguing oddities in its action, made it seem that a further investigation would be profitable. Dr. Harold King, then also at the National Institute for Medical Research, to whom a great deal of the fundamental chemistry of the curare alkaloids is due, had been struck, during his war-time work on