The advantages and accidents of artificial anaesthesia : a manual of anaesthetic agents, and their employment in the treatment of disease / by Laurence Turnbull.

  • Laurence Turnbull
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The advantages and accidents of artificial anaesthesia : a manual of anaesthetic agents, and their employment in the treatment of disease / by Laurence Turnbull. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    ARTIFICIAL ANAESTHESIA. INTRODUCTION. AN3ESTHETICS OF THE ANCIENTS. THE ancient Greeks, it is stated, possessed a plant called mandrake. It belonged to the same family of plants as the belladonna, or deadly nightshade. From the root of tins plant was extracted, by means of wine, a narcotic which was employed by them as an anaesthetic. Lucius Apuleius, who lived about 160 A. D., and of whose works eleven editions were republished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, says that if a man has to have a limb mutilated, sawn, or burnt, he may take half an ounce of niandragbra wine, and whilst be sleeps the member may be cut off without pain or sense. To prove that this was true, Dr. B.W. Richardson, of London, after a lapse of five centuries, obtained a fine specimen of mandragora root, and made mandragora wine and tested it, and found it was a nar- cotic having precisely the properties that were anciently ascribed to it. He found that in animals it would produce even the sleep of Juliet, not for thirty or forty hours, a term thai must lie accepted as a poetical license, but easily for the four hours named by Dioscorides; and, on awakening, there was an excitement which tallied witli the same phenomenon that was observed by the older physicians. Another fact was noticed by the ancients, that many volatile substances acted more promptly by inhalation than by the stomach, and this form of medication was employed in Greece, Rome, and Arabia. By their published works, the knowledge of these facts was extended to other parts of the world. In China, in ancient times, the word ma->jo meant not only Indian hemp, but ansesthetic medicine; other sub- Stances besides hem]) entered into these benumbing recipes,