A Biennial Retrospect of Medicine, Surgery and Their Allied Sciences (V. 112) - Livres de poche

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: REP01IT ON SURGERY. O RY T. HOLMES. The following extracts refer to new inventions in surgery, or to the reintroduetiou of methods of treatment which had previously fallen into oblivion. New Anaesthetic Agents. Nitrous oxide.?Of late the nitrous oxide (laughing-gas) has been introduced and extensively used as an anaesthetic. We extract the following account of its supposed physiological action from the ' British Medical Journal," April 18, 1868. " In two papers published about four years ago, Dr. Hermann arrived at soino interesting results touching the physiological action of nitrous and nitric oxide. (Reichert, Du Bois Reymond's ' Archiv, ' 1864, p. 521; 1865, p. 469.) From these researches it would appear that, while laughing-gas is very readily absorbed by blood, it neither enters into combinatiqp with, nor produces changes iu, nor suffers changes from, the action of blood. It is now generally believed that the oxygen present in blood exists in a peculiar loose combination with the blood- corpuscles, and is not retained by simple physical laws of absorption. Laughing-gas, on the contrary, is merely physically absorbed, and blood will take up rather less of it than it will of water. That is to say, 100 volumes of blood will, at the temperature of the blood, absorb somewhat less than 60 volumes of laughing-gas. Blood saturated with laughing- gas shows no sign of change; the spectrum appearances are the same; the blood-corpuscles are unaltered; and, according to Hermann, the oxygen is not driven out. In the blood, and probably in the body, laughing-gas suffers itself no change. It doea not give up its oxygen for purposes of oxidation, as Sir Humphry Davy thought. It gives rise, therefore, to no free nitrogen; but goes out of the body, as it comes into the body, pure...