Childbirth Aids

One of the most delicate and stubborn surgical problems is the relief of pain in childbirth. Injection of synthetic, cocaine-like drugs, such as novocain and procaine, into the canal of the spinal cord is objectionable because such injections act on the cord and brain, interfere with the heart. Anesthetics such as ether and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) are harmful because they cause a deficiency of oxygen in the blood streams of mother and child.

Last week in Manhattan, at the 17th Annual Congress of Anesthetists new, safe drugs for relief of labor pains were enthusiastically discussed by Drs. S. Le Roy Sahler, chief of anesthesia in the Rochester, N. Y. General Hospital, Peter Graffagnino, head of the gynecology department of Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans, and Louis Wralter Seyler of Commerce, Texas.

Instead of introducing drugs into the fluid of the spinal canal, and affecting the entire circulatory and nervous systems, the anesthetists filled the empty epidural space at the base of the spine (between the inner wall of the spinal column and the sheath of the spinal cord) with 30-60 cubic centimeters of distilled water solutions of pantocain. metycaine, intracaine or other similar local anesthetics.

The solution bathed the nerve trunks of organs involved in childbirth and effectively killed pain. The efficiency of motor nerves which aid in propelling a child out of the birth canal was not impaired. Chief merit of the new drugs is that each has a different length of action, and doctors predicting the length of labor can inject a drug with sufficiently lasting effects.

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