Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The discoverers of anesthetics are classed among the greatest benefactors of humanity, because it is believed that ether, chloroform, cocaine and similar nerve-paralyzing agents have greatly lessened the sum of human suffering. I doubt, however, that this is true.
In vain do the sentimental champions of vivisection declare themselves the most humane of men, inflicting suffering only to relieve it, scrupulous in the use of anesthetics, and void of all passion except the passion of pity for a disease-ridden world.
Several practical applications of psychology were now in general use; it had largely superseded drugs, antiseptics and anesthetics in medicine; was employed by almost all who had any need of mental concentration. A real enlargement of human faculty seemed to have been effected in this direction.
Further striking testimony in favor of the hypothesis that the production of acidity by inhalation anesthetics is the method by which anesthesia itself is produced is found in the fact that although lethal doses of acid cause muscular paralysis, yet this paralysis may be mitigated by adrenalin which is alkaline.
We see, therefore, that anesthesia is made possible, first, by the fact that inhalation anesthetics cause acidity, and, second, by the antithetic adaptation of the higher centers in the brain and of the centers governing respiration and circulation. In deep contrast to the action of inhalation anesthetics is that of narcotics.
She thought very clearly of Death for a moment, and then of God. She had often thought of Death and of God, and was surprised to find that she had been wrong about both. "I thought He never gave you anesthetics " she told herself. "Why, that's what death is "
It held out to the capitalists who deplored the loss of their milliards a potential source whence part of that loss might be made good. To the zealots of the League of Nations it offered an unresisting body on which all the requisite operations from amputation to trepanning might be performed without the use of anesthetics.
These two cases are illustrations of the same principle that underlies the freedom from pain which results from the use of narcotics and anesthetics, the same principle that explains the fact that cholecystitis may occur in the aged without any other local symptoms than the presence of a mass and perhaps very slight tenderness; and that accounts in general for the lack of well-expressed disease phenomena in senility and in infancy.
This observation may explain in part the remarkable success of the method of resuscitation devised by me, in which animals "killed" by anesthetics and asphyxia are revived by the use of adrenalin.
An operation may occasionally be absolutely necessary as a means of saving life. Surgery is also indicated in cases of injury, such as wounds or fractured bones, in certain obstetrical complications and in other affections of a purely mechanical nature. In all such cases anesthetics prevent much suffering which cannot be avoided in any other way.
Word Of The Day