Word: anaesthesia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Then why try? Why not let the unbearable past recede into the anaesthesia of history books? "Simply because we can't and still call ourselves human beings," said Wiesel at journey's end. "We do not have this commission simply to remember, but to warn. Last time it was the killing of the Jews, then the attempt to annihilate humanity itself. Between the two came the sin of indifference. Today when we hear the word holocaust it is preceded by the word nuclear. If there is to be no new holocaust, first we have to look backward...
Purging, emetics and bloodletting were common remedies; surgery consisted of "cutting for stone" and amputations. With no anaesthesia, the best surgeons were the ones who could cut, hack and saw most rapidly, aided by the strongest assistants to hold the patient down. Herbs and plants were extensively used in treatment. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay prescribed a paste of wood lice, while Cotton Mather-who together with Zabdiel Boylston brought inoculation to the colonies in 1721 to prevent serious cases of smallpox-condemned the use by Boston physicians of "Leaden Bullets," to be swallowed for "that miserable Distemper which...
...Verdict Knef deals just as effectively with the panic of being sick in a modern hospital. Emerging from anaesthesia, she hears herself being discussed by attendants: "Would you recognize her? I mean, the way you know her from TV?" There is the blinding need for painkillers. "I'm not allowed to give you anything" is the standard reply. "My bed is standing in the middle of the room," writes Knef. "It didn't quite make it to the wall. My room in hell has been lifted out of time, hordes of starving rats are gnawing at my belly...
Untimely Death, The second-guessing among the experts was intense. Some questioned the failure to use more care in easing Ruffian out of the anaesthesia. When she awoke, she knocked off her cast in frenzy, which led to the decision to destroy her. Would other methods of treatment have worked? Continuous sedation is unrealistic because a horse lying too long on its side develops radial paralysis; placing a horse in a sling often impairs circulation and waste elimination and could cause death; finally, putting a horse on a rubber raft in a pool, so that kicking off a cast becomes...
Russian Roulette. When a woman enters the hospital for a biopsy, her surgeon usually asks her permission to perform a mastectomy if the biopsy should be positive. Thus most women go under anaesthesia without knowing whether they will wake up breastless or not. Surgeons defend this practice on the ground that it reduces both the risk and the expense of two operations. Even so, some women would rather know beforehand what they face, and some surgeons agree that there is no harm in waiting a few days between a biopsy and a mastectomy. "A cancer isn't going...