Local anæsthesia from cold.

  • Arnott, James, 1794-1885.
Date:
[1854]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Local anæsthesia from cold. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    Local Anj^sthesia from Cold. At the conclusion of a paper on local anajsthesia in the Lancet of the 6th Inst., the hope is expressed thai a case of death from Chloroform which had just occurred in one of the Paris Hospitals would be amongst the last. V\ hile that paper was in the press, and five days after its publication, two other deaths from this cause occurred in London Hospitals, in both of which insensibility might have been safely produced by local means. Can any .practitioner interested in the welfaie of his patient, or jealous of the character of his profession for hu- manity, longer hesitate about the necessity of a change of practice in this respect? Can he sanction Chloroform's longer, forming so strange an anomaly in Medicine? For, on what other occasion is it deemed justifiable to endanger life by the employment of a measure for which there is a substitute of perfect safety ? And even were the only efifects of Chloroform to be loss of consciousness, prostration, headache and sickness, why should the patient be subjected to these when insensibility can be produced without any unpleasant conse(iuenco by a momentary application ol^enumbing cold ? This change of practice is being rapidly made in France — In the Medical Times and Oazetie of March 25th, I have quoted from a lecture of M. Velpeau on the subject, and might also have referred to the same eminent surgeon's account of the operations in which he has produced insensibility by frigorific mixtures, when, in his recent work on diseases of the breast, he is speaking of the employment of congelation in cancer. Who is there, says the Editor of the Gazette des Hopitaux, (April 8th,) that would not bo happy to have such a means for the most common and usual operations, or those which every practitioner is daily called upon to practise without being -.pecially a surgeon ? Must not the surgeon henceforth bo taxed with rashness, who having at his command this means,