The induction of sleep and insensibility to pain by the safe self-administration of anaesthetics / by John M. Crombie.

  • Crombie, John Mann, 1844-1883.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The induction of sleep and insensibility to pain by the safe self-administration of anaesthetics / by John M. Crombie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    would have remained for the more sympathetic souls of the future. And so if medical journals in our day, as the writer asserts, can content themselves with all that they know of human suffering, to preach only barren lectures on caution, in the bleak and dismal hope of matching pain with “ plati- tudes ” and soothing agony with words, it is very certain the doctrine of medical anaesthesia will, so far they are concerned, progress very slowly in the profession. For our own part we do not at all believe this report, as in many cases at least we know the contrary to be true, although it may be that ade- quate attention is not given to the great subject of Pain. To call, however, the absolute proscription of anodynes caution is surely a misnomer, as to tell one who must travel by rail that he must not for fear of accidents is not caution but nonsense. So if it be true that never yet philosopher could bear the toothache patiently, a physician at the bedside of a sensitive subject under the yoke of intolerable suffering, entirely proscribing anodynes, on the plea of caution, and delivering himself of a bosomful of medical stoicism, may with difficulty be imagined, but is surely much too ridicu- lous for reality. Then the writer professes to wish to know something more of “the mystery of pain” than Science has yet revealed, which would be very proper indeed if in the first place he had learned as much as Science has already revealed. To require, however, to be royally initiated into the refinements and subtleties of analytical geometry, and keep braying on the donkey side of the pons asinorum, would not be considered the best way to advance in mathematics. It is very nauseous to hear people talk in pompous sublimity about the mystery of pain, or the mystery of anything, who are as shamefully destitute of information on the subject as if never a book had been written or thought expressed on the subject. Such, however, is the common cant of all who are too indolent to learn, or cannot, and must nevertheless pass for wiser than anybody. There is, in one sense, as much mystery about the nature of a sugar-plum as there is about the nature of pain, for where nothing can be comprehended everything must be equally mysterious. But with most people the conditions