Stimulants and narcotics, their mutual relations : with special researches on the action of alcohol, aether, and chloroform, on the vital organism / by Francis E. Anstie.

  • Francis E. Anstie
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Stimulants and narcotics, their mutual relations : with special researches on the action of alcohol, aether, and chloroform, on the vital organism / by Francis E. Anstie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    or two. iEther, which is to a considerable degree soluble in serum, appears to be eliminated to a very small extent by the kidneys; but is to be detected in the breath for many hours after an anaesthetic dose has been administered, though I have doubts whether this is the case when merely medicinal doses have been used internally, in cases of disease to which its action is beneficial. But alcohol, which is highly soluble in serum, is eliminated only in minute proportions, and very slowly, except in instances where an excessive dose, and such as produces narcotic eflPects, has been suddenly thrown into the system. Even in the latter case, it is with difficulty that the organism is so far freed of its presence as to emerge from the narcotic state. I have dwelt on this fact with regard to alcohol, and have detailed experiments which exemplify it, because I am anxious to impress on the reader’s mind an important inference which appears to follow inevitably from it: namely, that alcohol was never designed by the wisdom of Providence to be employed by the human race as an ancesthetic at all, but for the sake of those stimulant qualities of its non-narcotic doses, which are to a certain extent also shared by small doses of aether and chloro- form. It seems as if the former were intended to be the medicine of those ailments which are engendered of the necessary every-day evils of civilized life, and has therefore been made attractive to the senses, and easily retained in the tissues, and in various ways approving itself to our judgment as a food; while the others, which are more rarely needed for their stimulant properties, and are chiefly valuable for their beneficent