RELATIONS AND VALUES OF THE ANAESTHETICS. 
257 
so abnormal and in contravention to general physiological 
law, only a few years since excited the gravest apprehension, 
and that even now, when witnessed under other circumstances 
and surroundings—as the effect of narcotics, and defined as 
poisoning —is a cause of profound anxiety and secures the most 
active measures for its relief. It should be remembered that 
anaesthesia is narcosis , and consequently poisoning. In this 
connection permit me to quote the veteran, Dr. Edward R. 
Squibb,* one of the ablest of American scientists, whose 
laurels have been won in the ranks of both medicine and phar¬ 
macy, and as much in the physiological laboratory as over the 
chemist’s table: 
The roughly expressed though perhaps practical condition 
essential to anaesthesia, is diminished oxydation of the senso- 
rium, and the primary object is to confine this within the limits 
of safety. It is a kind of partial asphyxia or suffocation, oc- 
curing, not in the organs of respiration and circulation prima¬ 
rily, but far back of those in the tissues where the vital power 
is generated or renewed. The air-passages normally admit 
oxygen, and the blood takes it up and carries it, but carries 
with it an agent which prevents or modifies its assimilation in 
the tissues which supply the vital forces. To diminish 
this assimilation or this supply, seems to constitute anaesthesia. 
To arrest or prevent it, is death by narcosis. Hence the line 
of greatest safety in practice is to regard the difference 
between anaesthesia and death as a difference in degree or 
quantity only. The condition may be partial, full, profound, 
or fatal, but with no distinct boundary line between the de¬ 
grees. The two intermediate degrees or stages constitute 
anaesthesia proper, and the full anaesthesia is generally re¬ 
quired in surgery, while the stage of partial anaesthesia is 
generally sufficient in medicine. In the production of anaes¬ 
thesia, the more powerful, prompt, and efficient the agents 
and the larger the dose, the greater the liability to overleap 
the intermediate stages, and unexpectedly extinguish life. 
This seems but plain, common sense, and physicians are 
very familiar with the principle in the action of all toxic 
agents and in the toxic influence of all acute diseases, and yet 
they often fail to apply it in their selection of the agent and 
the dose to produce this most acute of all diseased conditions, 
* Epliemeris, vol. 2, p. 629. 
