The anæsthetist's pocket companion / by Robert Marston.

  • Marston, Robert.
Date:
[1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The anæsthetist's pocket companion / by Robert Marston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    first came into general use; have since that day been removed by the later acquisition of knowledge, which has been obtained at such a dreadful cost of human life, during that pro- tracted period : for all the experimenting and theorising of practitioners during that long period, has failed to place the practice of Anaesthetics on either a scientific, or a reasonable foundation. Proof of this assertion may be found in the Anaesthetics Controversy of to-day; it is also manifest in the rule of thumb methods now in use; and worse still, it is evidenced by the large proportion of Anaesthetic fatalities proved to have been caused by accidental over-narcotisation. It is well known that in most of those cases, the Anaesthetic was administered from a napkin, or other absorbtive material, without the slightest pretension of ascertaining either the quantity, or percentage, of the drug inhaled; and it is remarkable that whenever such an accident occurs, professional representative journals decry, not the uncertain and dan- gerous method which undoubtedly caused death, but the Anaesthetic selected for the operation, and in that way they tacitly cen- sure the Anaesthetist, whose alleged error of judgment, they suppose, has caused, or faciliated the patients death. Such censure is all the more unreasonable because they never suggest how these occurrences could be avoided, beyond reiterating that Ether is
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