Hydrate of chloral and nitrous oxide gas as anaesthetics / by Charles Kidd.

  • Kidd, Charles.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hydrate of chloral and nitrous oxide gas as anaesthetics / by Charles Kidd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    have chlox'oform now; that he could not have it twelve hours hence after reaction from shock. Soldiers do not die for want of cotton to plug into fresh sabi'e wounds, as feared in Waterloo times. A gypsum bandage Avould be more useful in fracture, or silver suture to sew up such sabre wound. “ Pain,” said a Horse Guard’s circular, in the Crimea, “is a healthy stimulus.” Brave soldiers do not want such a weak womanish thing as chloroform. Poor wounded soldiers waited their turn at a canvas tent to be amputated, listening to the shrieks of those inside; what hours of anguish, sinking, and despair; and so was it at Metz, and in a minor degree at Versailles. But yet, finally, civil practice tells us pain is not a stimulus, but a leveller, or agent of destruction. Travers and Dupuytren bear us witness in this. And of “rest” for the shattered leg or arm. What experience have we had of Mr. Hilton in a thirty years’ watching at Guy’s? Surely no stimulus is pain, or nights without sleep, tossing about, mental agitation, anguish, torture. Of the soldier we may say as of Lear— “ Our foster nurse of Nature is repose, That which he lacks—but to provide in him Are many medicines, operative, whose power Will close the eye of anguish.” But it required the humanity of good men to prove this; nor can it be proved too often for present, and, aye, for future men who esteem the Geneva red cross.—“Many medicines, operative”—the chloral hydrate superior to chloroform in procuring sleep, and that repose necessary for satisfactory recovery.