On the physiological action of nitrous oxide / by Dudley Wilmot Buxton.

  • Buxton, Dudley Wilmot, 1855-1931.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the physiological action of nitrous oxide / by Dudley Wilmot Buxton. 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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    a considerable time. This has been done by allow- ing the patient to respire air at long intervals. In this way a really prolonged narcosis can be effected. Clearly in such cases the narcosis was something wholly outside of the concurrent asphyxia, and it is the great disadvantage of our present methods of administering nitrous oxide that we can hardly avoid producing more or less asphyxia while we are seek- ing only to promote the action of nitrous oxide upon the nervous centres. M. Paul Bert has by his well- known plan sought to obviate this drawback. I do not propose to address you upon his method, as that is as well known to you as to me, but I claim your attention to the important fact which under- lies the success of M. Paul Bert's system. It is, that so long as he succeeds in supplying the bodily need of oxygen side by side with enough nitrous oxide to induce narcosis, he is able to achieve a prolonged unconsciousness, and yet his patient maintains his respiratory and vital equihbrium. I have no personal experience of the method, nor am I aware whether a narcosis lasting so long as an hour has been achieved. It yet remains to be shown whether nitrous oxide acts in virtue of a power it might possess of reducing the oxyhsemoglobin of the blood, the oxy-myo-h[ematin and oxyha^moglobin of the tissues. Were this the case we should expect to find it capable of either fixing the oxygen, as
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