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.
608/664 page 588
![its action. To remedy this Longard 1 had made, by a Berlin firm specializing in such things, an £ annular thermophor ' (the precise nature of which was not disclosed). The thermophor, when immersed in boiling water for from one to two minutes, absorbed and subsequently retained heat; it was placed, immediately before induction was begun, between the upper layer of metal gauze and the lid of the inhaler, where it fitted accurately. By warming the incoming stream of air it effectively prevented the formation of ice crystals.2 All these methods of deliberately warming ether described above had one aim—to make the administration of ether vapour more readily controllable by the administrator. In 1876 Robert Lawson Tait, surgeon to the Birmingham Hospital for Women, suggested a very different motive for warming ether—the preven- tion or lessening of the danger to the patient of pulmonary and bronchial complications following the inhalation of ether vapour. ' For the last two years,' wrote Tait in 1876, ' I have had ether given in all my ovariotomies, and, indeed, in all operations where it was at hand. . . . ' About the time that my friend Mr. Jessop noticed in the Lancet [1875, n> 32^] tnat patients might suffer from the after effects of ether in the shape of pulmonary inflammation, I had a case of severe bronchitis in an aged person after the administra- tion4 of ether. A few weeks after, I had another experience of a similar kind, and then became convinced that ether was not free from risk, and that the source of danger was the loss of heat on the pulmonary surface by the administration of air and ether vapour at a very low temperature. . . . ' Having twice experienced the danger from bronchitis, I tried various plans for removing what I believed to be its cause, and that which I found to be the best, is to give the vapour of boiling anhydrous ether [ether boils at 34*6° C, just below body temperature], pure and free from any admixture of air.5 Lawson Tait's apparatus (Fig. 157) and method of use were as follows : liquid ether was poured into a reservoir (capacity about ten ounces). The reservoir was fitted with a spring pump which at every stroke injected about one drachm of ether into a glass vaporizing chamber partly immersed in a water tank kept 1 The inhaler itself was designed by Wagner alone. He appears to have based hi design on that of an American inhaler for ether devised by Joseph W. Hearn, os Philadelphia, about 1883. (Cf. Turnbull, L. 1880 (2nd ed.). The advantages and accidents of artificial anaesthesia. London. 233.) 2 Zbl. Chir., 1900, 27, 857-8.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20457200_0616.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
