The development of inhalation anaesthesia : with special reference to the years 1846-1900... / [Barbara M. Duncum].
- Duncum, Barbara M.
- Date:
- 1947
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The development of inhalation anaesthesia : with special reference to the years 1846-1900... / [Barbara M. Duncum]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
387/664 page 367
![anaesthesia, we think, also, that it is necessary to know far more about the matter than M. P.Bert has yet taught us. . . . ' M. P.Bert's new suggestion, by providing those who advise moderate but at the same time progressive doses, with a fresh argument, will have contributed towards making increasingly safe the simple process to which the majority of surgeons will always be obliged to give preference.' 1 Richet, after agreeing with Gosselin's criticisms and describ- ing three cases in which he himself had seen Bert's measured mixture administered by Dubois for Pean, at the Hopital Saint- Louis, stated : ' Theoretically it seems to me, if not impossible at least very difficult, to admit that one could ever demonstrate the harmless- ness of any anaesthetic method without first having discovered the cause of death from the inhalation of chloroform. But, up to the present, all is mystery and, in spite of the extremely numerous and painstaking researches of the physiologists, we must still fall back upon hypotheses. It is, indeed, a hypothesis which our learned colleague puts forward when he speaks of his limited dose and until we have a more complete demonstration I refuse to accept it. . . . ' I must say ', Richet added, ' that the dangers of death from anaesthesia have been remarkably exaggerated ; among more than a million individuals who have submitted to anaesthesia, one can only with difficulty muster 290 to 300 cases of death attributed to these inhalations. . . .' Referring specifically to Bert's proposal that only measured mixtures should be used for anaesthesia, Richet said : ' About twenty-four years ago, the Chloroform Committee of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London recommended mixtures and that, above all, if one wished to proceed in relative safety, 3-50 per cent, of chloroform vapour in the air must not be exceeded. I will merely call to mind the apparatuses of Snow, Demarquay, Duroy, Sansom, Junker, Skinner, Esmarch and Billroth, and will single out Clover's alone, because it offers the strongest analogy to that of M. Bert [2]. The principles are the same ; only the form of the apparatuses differs. . . . 1 C.R. Acad. Sci., Paris, 1884, 98, 121-4. 2 During February, March, and April 1882, a discussion on chloroform anaesthesia was held among the members of the Academie de Medecine. In the course of this discussion Gosselin, among others, had had occasion to refer to Bert's researches of 1881 on measured mixtures of chloroform and air, and a fellow-member, Leon le Fort, then drew attention to the above-mentioned inhalers, and to the previous use of measured chloroform-air mixtures, particularly Clover's. (Bull. Acad. Med. Paris,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20457200_0391.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
