[Report in regard to the discovery of anaesthesia].

  • United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Anaesthesia.
Date:
[1854]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [Report in regard to the discovery of anaesthesia]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    1. Some boil down the roots in wine to a third part, and preserve the juice thus procured, and give one cyathus of it in sleeplessness and severe pains, of whatever part; also, to cause the insensibility—to produce the anaesthesia {poiein anaisthesian) of those ivho are to be cut or cauterized. 2. There is prepared, also, besides the decoction, a wine from the bark of the root, three minae being thrown into a cask of sweet wine, and of this three cyathi are given to those who are to be cut or cauterized, as aforesaid; for being thrown into a deep sleep, they do not perceive pain. 3. Speaking of another variety of mandragora, called morion, he observes, medical men use it also for those who are to be cut or cauterized. Dioscorides also describes the stone Memphitis, mentioned by Pliny, and says that when it is powdered and applies to parts to be cut or cauterized, they are rendered, without th'e slightest danger, wholly insensible to pain. Matthiolus, the commentator on Dioscorides, confirms his statement of the virtues of mandra- gora, which is repeated by Dodoneus. Wine in which the roots of mandragora has been steeped, says this later writer, brings on sleep, and appeases all pains, so that it is given to those who are to be cut, jj^wed, or burned, in any parts of their body, that they may not perceive pain. The expressions used by Apuleius, of Madaura, who flourished^ about a century after Pliny, are still more remarkable than those already quoted from the older authors. He says, when treating of mandragora, If any one is to have a member mutilated, burned, or sawed, {mutilandum, comburendum, vel serrandum^ let him drink half an ounce with wine, and let him sleep till the mem- ber is cut away, without any pain or sensation, {et tantum dormiet, quosque abscindatur membrum aliquo sine dolore et sensu.) AncBsthetic agents used in China centuries ago. It was not in Europe and in Western Asia alone that these early efforts to discover some letheon were made, and attended with partial success. On the opposite side of the continent, the Chinese, who have anticipated the Europeans in so many import- ant inventions, as in gunpowder, the mariner's compass, printing, lithography, paper money, and the use of coal, seem to have been quite as far in advance of the occidental world in medical science. They understood, ages before they were introduced into Christen- dom, the use of substances containing iodine for the cure of the goitre, and employed spurred rye, ergot, to shorten dangerously prolonged labor in difficult accouchments. Among the therapeutic methods confirmed by the experience of thousands of years, there- cords of which they have preserved with religious veneration, the employment of an anjESthetic agent to paralyze the nervous sensi- bility before performing surgical operations, is distinctly set forth. Among a considerable number of Chinese works on the pharma-