Word: etherealizing
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Last week the patient did as well as could be expected. The preoperative prayers were said with muted strings; the ether was given with dissonance; the incision and sewing up came with a clatter of busy brass and woodwinds. The non-medical found Composer Parris' music not quite surgically clean: it had echoes of everything from Grieg to Gershwin. But nobody denied that it was good...
Andrew, born in Budapest and a resident of the U.S. for only seven years, was too surprised to make a thank-you speech. He had found three commercial substitutes for inflammable ethyl ether. Being the youngest of the finalists, he had not expected to win. Said he: "I bet some body a dollar I wouldn't, so I'd be sure to get something out of the deal...
...clue, he thought, lay in an enzyme called hyaluronidase, which exists in the testes, eyes, spleen, skin. He believed that it exists in large amounts in most cancers. He devised a urine test: the enzyme is extracted from the urine with ether, then mixed with a solution of fresh umbilical cord and rabbit serum. Two weeks ago, in the first issue of the new South Dakota Journal of Medicine and Pharmacy, he reported his findings: if the solution remains clear, the patient has the enzyme in his body in larger than normal amounts-and may have cancer. If the solution...
John Doe had a hernia 15 years ago-and he still talks about his operation. It was certainly something to remember. There was that terrible three weeks in the hospital: the retching, agonizing hangover when he came out of the ether, the two weeks flat on his back (not eating, not sleeping) and his belly a constant, burning torment. Months after he was back at work, he felt something like a big hole where the scalpel had slit his muscles; and for years he looked with awed distaste at the lumpy, four-inch scar on his abdomen...
...anesthetics have replaced sick-making ether, or made it possible to use much less. Hangover-proof cyclopropane was first demonstrated only 15 years ago; curare, a South American arrow poison introduced four years ago, relaxes muscles, reduces the amount needed of any general anesthetic. Sodium pentothal (the "truth drug"), no more terrifying than a sleeping pill, is enough for some operations ; it may also be used to calm a frightened, fighting patient for the once-dreaded trip to the operating room...