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.
519/664 page 499
![I SOME NEW DEVELOPMENTS 499 In America the editor of the Dental Cosmos, in the late spring of 1892, submitted a sample of ethyl chloride to Professor H. C. Wood, asking him to investigate its physiological properties c sufficiently to determine the question whether . . . [it] can be of service as . . . [a] practical anaesthetic'. On June 22 Wood described the results of the investigation of ethyl chloride which he and his associate David Cerna had made before a meeting of the Philadelphia County Medical Society. He stated that owing to the smallness of the sample submitted for testing only a few experiments, on dogs, could be made. These showed ' that the chloride of ethyl is capable of acting as an anaesthetic [by inhalation] provided that its vapor be given in concentrated form '. The results obtained were not consistent, however, for in one instance, after producing two minutes' complete anaesthesia with ten grams of ethyl chloride, given from a cone ' almost impervious to the air and so flexible that it could be ligatured around the dog's nose ', a second application of the cone recharged with ten grams of ethyl chloride inexplicably failed to produce anaesthesia. In two other cases in which ten grams of the drug were administered through a tracheal tube, one administration lasting about three minutes, the other being made as rapidly as possible, no anaesthesia resulted. Wood stated in conclusion : ' As the result of the various experiments which we have made with chloride of ethyl, we believe that the fugaciousness of the action of the drug must interfere with its use as a general anaes- thetic, and that its depressing effect upon the circulation is too pronounced for it to be a safe anaesthetic. It is most probable that if it should come to be employed in practical medicine as an anaesthetic there would be a record of sudden deaths through cardiac failure proportionately even more numerous than those caused by chloroform.' 1 During 1894, however, H. Carlson, a Gothenburg dentist, accidentally produced general instead of local anaesthesia with ethyl chloride in two cases. One of the patients had been anaesthetized on previous occasions, once with ethyl bromide (see p. 212) and once with chloroform. This man emphatic- ally stated that of the three anaesthetics ethyl chloride was by far the most pleasant, producing no feeling of suffocation or 1 Wood, H. C, and Cerna, D. ' Chloride of ethyl and pental', reprinted from](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20457200_0523.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
