A treatise on etherization in childbirth. Illustrated by five hundred and eighty-one cases / By Walter Channing.

  • Walter Channing
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on etherization in childbirth. Illustrated by five hundred and eighty-one cases / By Walter Channing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    29/428 (page 7)
    Let the reader, then, look at the true point at issue; and, above all, let him not be misled in his judgments by ignorance, by prejudice, or more especially by a priori reasoning. Since receiving answers to the circular, I have, upon every opportunity, talked to my brethren of what has hap- pened concerning etherization in their practice since they commenced it. I am told by all, that not an untoward occurrence has attended or followed its later use. From one, I learned that, since the newspaper accounts of alarm- ing and even fatal cases in surgical operations, patients and their friends have sometimes held back from etherization in midwifery, and that he waits for it to be asked for. The influence is natural upon patient and physician. And it is both natural and wise to act accordingly. It, however, makes nothing against the use of the remedy of pain in childbirth, in which it is known never to have done harm, if an untoward result come of its use in some two or more cases of surgical practice, and in some diseases which are almost invariably fatal, as tetanus and hydrophobia. The reader may look in this volume for the enunciation of principles concerning etherization which have come out of its facts, and which establish its place in practical medi- cine. I have examined the journals and papers in which these facts are scattered with a profusion which the impor- tance of the subject certainly authorizes, and with a variety in reasoning or opinion which attaches to few other subjects, but which its novelty and extreme interest fully explain. We are told that every thing has two sides, and the one chosen depends on the point of sight. Etherization would seem to have as many sides as there are observers, and doc- trines concerning it seem only limited by the number of observers. ‘There is Dubois, with his faith and his fears so well nigh balanced, that one feels that he has been so taken with all sides of the matter, that he hardly seems to have looked thoroughly at any. And there is Simpson of Kdin-