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
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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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    patient is labouring under great irritability and pain, he bears chloroform best; this is only another explanation of the view I have taken, that patients bear large operations under chloroform best; but deaths occur in the early stages, or from hysteric affections, or epilepsy, or delirium tremens, as may be perceived from the following contra-indications to chloroform: 1. A patient may take chloroform three or four, or more times, and yet die on the fifth or sixth, from lessened or altered irritability ; or from what is not at all impossible, viz., the use of impure chloroform, or the supervention of a new disease, such as delirium tremens. 2. Any unusual difficulty in bringing a patient under the fall effect of chloi'oform must always be looked upon with very great cautiousness, if not suspicion, as the absence of tolerance, or cumulative doses of chloroform in one part of the nervous system may do mischief in another part, when least expected, ex. gr., the largest amount of chloro- form that may not be able to annihilate the sensi- bility of an over-sensitive ulcerous skin, in a diseased limb, before amputation, may annihilate the action of the brain or a weak heart, without the slightest chance of recovery. In some of the older or earlier deaths by chloroform, we now read of chloroform used by the half-ounce at the time poured into the inhaler, and on pocket-handkerchiefs. One hears also of recurring syncope from this state of things. Occasionally, I have known patients obliged to be removed from the operating table, as no amount of chloroform seemed to affect them or to establish tolerance ] here it would be obviously