COCAINE ANALGESIA. 281 



researches of different men of various nationalities, which finally 

 culminated in a practical result. 



It was to an American, a well-known physician in New York, that 

 we owe the first suggestion of the idea. Dr. J. Leonard Corning, in 

 1885, discovered that frogs, those benefactors to the human race on 

 whom so many of the experiments for the good of man have been 

 tried, could get the characteristic reaction of strychnine from very 

 small solutions of the drug if it were injected into the spinal cord. 

 He then bethought him to try the effect of cocaine; he accordingly 

 experimented on dogs, injecting the anaesthetic between the superior 

 processes of the vertebrae, where the numerous minute vessels would 

 carry it to the cord. After a few minutes the dog lost all sensation in 

 its hind legs; it could be pinched and pricked and touched with an 

 electric bn^sh without knowing it, but the same treatment applied to its 

 fore legs brought forth yelps and howls. 



As there were no evil effects seen in the various dogs on which 

 Dr. Corning experimented, he tried the effect upon one of his 

 patients who had for some time suffered from spinal weakness; inject- 

 ing sixty drops of a 3 per cent, solution of cocaine into the tissues 

 about the spine, between the eleventh and twelfth dorsal vertebrae. 

 For the space of half an hour the man had absolutely no sensations 

 of pain in his lower limbs ; electricity and pin pricks were alike unno- 

 ticed, and Dr. Corning might have amputated a leg had his patient 

 needed to lose one of those members, and at one stroke have taken 

 all the fame of the discovery of a new form of anaesthesia; but in 

 an hour or more the patient arose and walked home, with no unpleas- 

 ant after-eft'ects, except for a slight headache and dizziness. Dr. 

 Corning reported on the frog, and dog, and man, to his medical col- 

 leagues, and threw out a general hint as to the possibility of extending 

 the usefulness of cocaine in operations; but there the matter dropped. 

 His experiments were, however, the germ of a new idea. 



Some years later, the German investigator, Quincke, devised a 

 method of puncturing the membrane surrounding the cord, so that 

 he might draw out a few drops of the spinal fluid, to see whether, in 

 such a disease as spinal meningitis, for instance, there were any bacteria 

 present, or whether he could discover any characteristics that would 

 help to diagnose certain obscure cases of disease by observing the 

 pressure of the fluid of the spinal cord. 



To penetrate to the very marrow of one's backbone would have 



seemed, fifteen years ago, to toy with the seat of life. Dr. Corning 



did not go nearer than the nerve tissues near the cord; but, once 



Quincke had shown that the needle of a hypodermic syringe could be 



thrust easily and painlessly and accurately into the space surrounding 



the spinal cord, and that a few drops of the cerebro-spinal fluid might 

 VOL. Lrx. — 18* 



