Lectures on General Anaesthetics in Dentistry; Advocating Painless Dental Operations by the Use of Nitrous Oxid, Nitrous Oxid and Oxygen, Chloroform Analgesia, Ethyl Chloride and Somnoform

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. To Whom it is Safe to Administer an Anaesthetic. Having shown that the properly qualified dental practitioner has the right to administer general ames- thetics in his daily work and pointed out the possibilities and advantages of operating on patients during anaesthesia, the question naturally arises, to whom is it safe to administer an anaesthetic? There is a mistaken idea on the part of both the profession and the laity as to whom it is safe to administer anaesthetics. A wide-spread impression prevails that if the heart is sound there can be no risk, whereas in about ninety per cent. of the facilities from chloroform, at the postmortem examination, the heart is found to be perfectly normal. (Luke.) Dr. Ochner, in the last edition of his Clinical Surgery, says: In my experience, patients suffering from organic heart lesions have never had any serious or alarming difficulty during the administration of anaesthetics, which is not true of patients whose hearts, lungs and kidneys were evidently normal. It is a remarkable fact that an individual whose health has become impaired by disease is often a better subject for an anaesthetic than one who enjoys robust health. Although his heart and lungs may be inexcellent condition and able to stand almost any strain, yet he will not pass so easily into anaesthetic sleep as a less robust patient, owing to the more frequent occurrence of struggling excitement which will interfere with the respiratory rhythm. (Luke.) Richardson thinks the bad effects of anaesthesia are largely due to over-confidence and non-experience of administration. He has never seen a death from ether itself, and he thinks that while there may have been some, the number is extremely small. Only urinary suppression and pneumonia seem to hi...