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.
443/664 page 423
![Although many surgeons continued to use ether anaesthesia, from 1895 onwards the German enthusiasm for it waned. Gurlt still compiled statistics by which he demonstrated that the annual death-rate from chloroform anaesthesia far exceeded that from ether, but he no longer made converts.1 This decline of interest was, to a considerable extent, due to the recent intro- duction of C. L. Schleich's new method of local anaesthesia by the infiltration of weak solutions of cocaine (see pp. 42-3), which increasingly attracted the attention given at the beginning of the decade to questions of inhalation anaesthesia.2 France In France the first unmistakable sign that a revival of the use of ether anaesthesia had begun was a paper on the subject by Chaput, Angelesco, and Lenoble. The paper was read by Chaput at a meeting of the Surgical Society of Paris in May 1895. From the list of references appended to the paper it is clear that Chaput and his colleagues had been following, with particular interest, the development of the revived use of ether in Germany. Chaput had, however, been in direct communica- tion by letter with Wanscher in Copenhagen, and it was the latter's apparatus and technique which were used by Chaput, Angelesco, and Lenoble in their clinical experiments (numbering 135) which were begun at the Salpetriere in 1894. The results of these 135 cases decided the investigators in favour of ether and in their opinion the only formidable disadvantage of its use lay in the possibility of subsequent chest complications. The risk of explosions, they thought, had been greatly exaggerated.3 More interesting than Chaput's paper was the discussion which followed the reading of it. The discussion was opened by Oilier, of Lyons, and for the first time for some forty-five years the words of a Lyonnais etherist were received with attention by the Parisian chloroformists (cf. pp. 204-7). ' For more than thirty years ', said Oilier, ' I have, on numer- ous occasions, shown my preference for ether as an anaesthetic [4] and my conviction in this connection has become increasingly 1 Cf., e.g., Berl. klin Wschr., 1897, 34, 459. 2 Cf. Kolaczck : ' Zur Narkosenfrage,' Dtsch. med. Wschr., 1896, 22, 179-80. 3 Bull. Soc. Chirurgie Paris, 1895, 21, 358-80. 4 An aphorism of Ollier's ran as follows : ' Ether is to chloroform as wine is to spirits '.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20457200_0447.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
