https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/29/slow-ideas
"Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the
very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of
which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The first public demonstration
of anesthesia was in 1846. The Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow was
approached by a local dentist named William Morton, who insisted that he had
found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery. That
was a dramatic claim. In those days, even a minor tooth extraction was
excruciating. Without effective pain control, surgeons learned to work with
slashing speed. Attendants pinned patients down as they screamed and thrashed,
until they fainted from the agony. Nothing ever tried had made much difference.
Nonetheless, Bigelow agreed to let Morton demonstrate his claim.
On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his
gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a
tumor in his jaw. The patient only muttered to himself in a semi-conscious
state during the procedure. The following day, the gas left a woman, undergoing
surgery to cut a large tumor from her upper arm, completely silent and
motionless. When she woke, she said she had experienced nothing at all.
Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the
discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the
Boston Medical and
Surgical Journal. Morton would not divulge the composition of the gas, which
he called Letheon, because he had applied for a patent. But Bigelow reported
that he smelled ether in it (ether was used as an ingredient in certain medical
preparations), and that seems to have been enough. The idea spread like a
contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. By
mid-December, surgeons were administering ether to patients in Paris and
London. By February, anesthesia had been used in almost all the capitals of
Europe, and by June in most regions of the world.
There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Some people criticized anesthesia
as a “needless luxury”; clergymen deplored its use to reduce pain during
childbirth as a frustration of the Almighty’s designs. James Miller, a
nineteenth-century Scottish surgeon who chronicled the advent of anesthesia,
observed the opposition of elderly surgeons: “They closed their ears, shut
their eyes, and folded their hands... They had quite made up their minds that
pain was a necessary evil, and must be endured.” Yet soon even the obstructors,
“with a run, mounted behind—hurrahing and shouting with the best.” Within seven
years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new
discovery."
Via Muse, who wrote "Amazing article! What a way to tell a story about medical
innovation!"
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
