28o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



COCAINE ANALGESIA OF THE SPINAL COED. 



By smith ELY JELLIFFE, M.D., Ph.D. 



THEEE are surgeons living to-day who remember the fascination 

 and horrors of necessary operations, when speed was as great a 

 requisite as skill to shorten the mortal agony, and when a famous sur- 

 geon would remove a limb in eleven minutes. There are many who 

 remember how slowly the boon of chloroform worked its way against 

 prejudice. To give it to ease the pain of childbirth was not only unsafe, 

 according to the family doctor, but sacrilegious, according to the 

 preacher, for did not the Holy Writ say, 'In sorrow shalt thou bring 

 forth children,' and who of Adam's daughters should presume to 

 escape the curse? Had it not been for the wit of Dr. Simpson, who 

 insisted that the Lord performed the first surgical operation under 

 anaesthesia when He caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep and took a 

 rib from his side, and the courage of Queen Victoria, who set the 

 example to the women of her empire by trusting her physician to give 

 her chloroform at the birth of one of her children, it is quite possible 

 that the ease from pain of all kinds might have been longer delayed. 



Soon after chloroform came ether, the safer anaesthetic, and the 

 one more frequently used, to produce unconsciousness in pain; and 

 then cocaine, that peculiar drug that, injected into the tissues, benumbs 

 the nerves and abolishes sensation of pain, and that gives the last 

 word of the century on anaesthesia. 



When the anaesthetic properties of this alkaloid of coca were dis- 

 covered, and it had been demonstrated that abscesses could be opened 

 and slight, but otherwise very painful, operations could be per- 

 formed without pain, under its influence, it was considered the one 

 thing necessary to complete the series of anaesthetics. The nerves, 

 however, quickly recovered from the effects of the drug, and hence 

 operations had to be accomplished in a comparatively short time. 

 Until recently, only minor operations of the external parts of the 

 body could be performed, and cocaine has been classed merely as a 

 local anaesthetic; but its future has suddenly opened along new and 

 startling lines in the discovery that when it is injected into the spinal 

 cord it causes a total loss of sensation to pain below the point of 

 puncture, so that most elaborate and difficult operations may be carried 

 on while the patient chats pleasantly with the surgeon and attendants. 



This discovery, like so many in medical science, did not flash into 

 existence like a new star in the firmament, but was the result of 



