The induction of sleep and insensibility to pain by the safe self-administration of anaesthetics / by John M. Crombie.

  • Crombie, John Mann, 1844-1883.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The induction of sleep and insensibility to pain by the safe self-administration of anaesthetics / by John M. Crombie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    have endeavoured to explain, that false opinions are instilled into and fostered in the public mind with the most lament- able consequences, but for what reason we are unable to comprehend. The names of the persons referred to have been omitted ; the italics are not in the original. “ The death of Lady following upon that of Mrs. under equally lamentable circumstances, has provided the medical journals with a text on which to hang one of their customary dis- sertations touching on the ‘ incautious use of powerful drugs as alleviatois of pain.’ The cause of Lady ’s death was an overdose of tincture of opium. Mrs. was supposed to have been suffocated with the fumes of chloroform; and in both cases the habit which the sufferer had acquired of keeping a supply of the anodyne beside them to wliich they could have recourse when pain attacked them with intolerable acuteness, seems to have been dangerous, to say the least. It is a truism to say that drugs which are poisons should be only handled with any freedom when the hands are skilled; and when an excellent medical contemporary gravely remarks that ‘'the indiscriminate practice of self-doctoring generally cannot be too strongly discountenanced,’ we feel that the opinion has that inevitable touch of the professional which may be something of a platitude, and even a selfish one, without ceasing there- fore to be useful. But, after all, can medical science, which, we are told in numerous annual lectures and at scientific congresses, is always active and always gaining fresh triumphs—can it do no more than tell people maddened with pain that they run a serious risk in reliev- ing their agonies by the only means available ? Since Dr. Simpson invented or utilised chlorofonn we seem to have stood still; we have not discovered the mode of rendering it safe in uninstructed hands, and, what is much icorse, toe have not discovered any really neic ano- dyne lohich may he perfectly safe whether the stopper escapes from a phial or not, and whether or not the trembling hand of the sufferer convulsed with pain lets fall a few extra drops of the tincture or the ether. Yet, inasmuch as we cannot always have a doctor at our elbows to measure out the dose with mathematical and cold-blooded precision, some such revelation of science is xohat we want, rather than barren lectures on caution. Surely the nume- rous experiments of the last thirty years might have taught us something more of the ‘ mystery of pain,’ and the means of as- suaging it. What has vivisection to say for itself in the matter 1 Have the hecatombs of dogs, cats, and rabbits, been tortured to no ])ui’pose 1 M e are told, in answer to indignant remonstrances against practices which make humanity shudder, that such experi- ments do great things for science, but we ask in vain for the dis- closure of results at all commensurate with the harrowing process. If the nerves of unfortunate animals are to be still anguished, and the torture-chamber ot the jdiysiologist to become an institution, at least let us sec that humanity gains something in one way, how- ever slight, for what it loses in the other.”