Anesthetists in Chicago

Anesthetists in Chicago

Facts which interested and instructed anesthetists who held a congress in Chicago last week on the sidelines of the Congress of Surgeons, included the following:

P: Queen Victoria had herself drugged with chloroform to soothe the labor of bearing Prince Leopold in 1853, and Princess Beatrice in 1857. Her gestures popularized the uses of chloroform, ether and nitrous oxide as anesthetics. Dr. John Snow (1813-58) who induced Queen Victoria to take the chloroform, had developed methods of administering anesthetics throughout an entire operation. For that the anesthetists last week saluted his memory.

P: Cyclopropane, a colorless gas derived from marsh gas, has been tried out as a new anesthetic at the Universities of Toronto and Wisconsin, with favorable results. Cyclopropane is not unpleasant to take, without harmful effects on the heart, less inflammable than other anesthetic gases, as relaxing to the patient as ether. P: Oxygen skillfully injected in small quantities under the skin will accomplish almost everything that inhaled oxygen does. A pint of subcutaneous oxygen has the beneficial effects of several hundred gallons of inhaled oxygen. Presuming skill on the part of the doctor, injected oxygen lessens the cost and speeds the efficacy of oxygen therapy in pneumonia, heart disease, asthma, carbuncles, severe infections, deep burns.

P:The "energy index" is a measure of the ability of a person's heart to endure an operation. To compute the energy index, add the blood pressure while the heart is contracted to the blood pressure while the heart is dilated, and multiply the sum by the pulse rate. A normal person, said Dr. W. Stanley Sykes of Leeds, England, has an energy index of 14,400 millimetres of mercury per minute, or the ability to lift that much mercury by the force of the heart action. If the figure runs up to 45,000 or 50,000, as is possible, it demonstrates to the physician that the heart has enlarged considerably to carry this load, and that an operation will be risky.

P: Alcohol injected into certain nerves as they emerge from the spine relieves pain without otherwise affecting the patient. Therefore, Dr. Perry Maurice Lichtenstein, Manhattan criminologist, uses the method to speed the cure of narcotic addicts. The alcohol quiets the nausea, neuralgia and other symptoms which the addict surfers while quitting his habit.

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