On chloroform and other anæsthetics: their action and administrationSnow, John
History
On chloroform and other anæsthetics: their action and administration
Snow, John
Anesthetics; Chloroform; Snow, John, 1813-1858
There are six cases in which the fatal symptoms came on just after the
patient had been rendered insensible, and the inhalation had been
discontinued; the operation being about to be commenced. They are
numbered 32, 34, 39, 43, 48, and 49. All these cases bear a very close
resemblance to each other. In all of them the patient had been made
insensible (satisfactorily so as it was thought), when in a few seconds
the pulse suddenly stopped, or failed and fluttered just prior to
stopping; in Case 32 Dr. Dunsmure thought the time was longer between
the discontinuance of inhalation and the cessation of the pulse. The
breathing continued a little time after the pulse ceased or failed in
all these cases, and there was an absence of the spluttering at the
mouth, stretching of the limbs, and other spasmodic actions, which
occurred in all the six cases where the heart was paralysed at the
beginning of the inhalation, before unconsciousness had been induced,
and in some of those when the paralysis of the heart took place at a
later period of the inhalation, when the patient had been apparently
rendered unconscious, but was not yet insensible. In each of the six
cases now under consideration, the fatal event was evidently occasioned
by the vapour of chloroform, which remained in the lungs at the moment
when the inhalation was discontinued. A portion of this vapour becoming
absorbed, and added to that already in the blood, had the effect of
paralysing the heart, when it circulated through the coronary arteries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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