Chloroform : its action and administration : a handbook / by Arthur Ernest Sansom.

  • Sansom Arthur Ernest, 1839-1907.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chloroform : its action and administration : a handbook / by Arthur Ernest Sansom. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    for surgical operations by Mr. Liston and Mr. Eergusson. No greater impression was ever made by any discovery. When Mr. Fergusson's first edition of bis work on ' Surgery' was published, the great truth was unknown; in his second edition there are words forcibly indicative of the deep impression the discovery had made. He says : Since the last edition of this work was published, a vast and important change has come over the department of ope- rative surgery. The discovery of anaesthesia or the means of causing insensibility to pain during the performance of ope- rations has been made in the interval, and now instead of wild outcries or stifled screams and groans coming from the patient under the surgeon's instruments, he may be made to lie as quietly as if in a calm sleep, or possibly during the most painful applications of the knife under other circumstances, he may be mentally engaged in the most pleasing associations of thought, or singing, or humming by snatches some favorite air. It is, perhaps, not saying too much when this discovery is characterised as the greatest, in most respects, which has been made in the province of surgery. In the early part of 1847 Mr. Jacob Bell used instead of sulphuric ether, chloric ether. This is merely a solution of chloroform in spirits of wine. It was successful in some cases; it came to be employed in some of the hospitals, and by Mr. Lawrence. It was, however, variable in strength, and its effects were not constant—moreover, it was expensive, so it fell into disuse. So near an approach did not suggest the employment of its active ingredient—chloroform. It is strange that the compounds of formyle should have been used for their narcotic and sedative properties by un- lettered peasantry. I have heard of crushed ants having been employed to allay local pain; and my friend Dr. Symes Thompson has communicated to me some interesting facts concerning their internal administration. In Norway, in the neighbour- hood of North Cape, the common beverage of the lower classes was, in former years, a spirit (distilled, I believe, from par- snips) in which a bag of large white ants were boiled and left to simmer. When the ant-bag had remained for an hour or more in the spirit, it was removed; the intoxicating beverage was then served out. The effect of this drink was rapidly to produce a dehghtful dreamy condition, which soon passed into complete unconsciousness from which it was impossible to