On aether and chloroform as anæsthetics : being the results of about 11,000 administrations of those agents personally studied in the hospitals of London, Paris, etc., during the last ten years / by Charles Kidd.

  • Kidd, Charles.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On aether and chloroform as anæsthetics : being the results of about 11,000 administrations of those agents personally studied in the hospitals of London, Paris, etc., during the last ten years / by Charles Kidd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    has been used in the human subject in place of chloroform, as an aneesthetic, it produced an em- barrassing sense of dyspnoea, attended with violent cough, together with a peculiar feeling of constric- tion of the throat. I mentioned before that some well-known weak Ehine wines, remarkable for their bouquet and absence of spirit, produce intoxicating effects and anaesthesia more readily than other wines, like sherry, with an equivalent of brandy in them. These weak Rhine wines, according to the ingenious researches of Miilder, contain aldehyde and some other delicate metamorphoses of amylene or fusel oil. The late Dr Snow told me a year or two ago of some impressions of his regarding aldehyde, which led him to try amylene; he found also that aldehyde produced, in fact, marked ansesthesia. Nitric gether is another compound like alde- hyde, which has been experimented with. This fluid is like common so-called sulphuric sether, but is at once known by its sugary taste. I am very much inclined to try this aether; it produces what I have already described as absence of sensation through the grey matter of the cord, as in this typical case of the lady and the dentist, and com- mon sethers—but it leaves the sense of touch [shall we call it the reflex or diastaltic sense of appreciating tactile phenomena ?] unchanged. Nitric aether (of course not the spts. nit. dulc. of the shops)—pure nitric gether produces insensi- bility to pain, in fact very readily ; but as I think it leaves the sense of appreciating tactile pheno- mena unchanged, as the patient, though ansesthe- tised by this aether, is sensible of the rush of blood