Word: ethers
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Everywhere he went, the visitor smelled ether, a sure sign of outdated anesthesia techniques. Disposable products such as linens and syringes were unknown, though they are in wide use in the U.S. "Diagnostic work is primitive," said Hall. "Xray equipment is antiquated. Blood-chemistry analysis is inefficient." The leisurely, informal pace was astounding. At a 500-bed hospital, ten to 15 operations a day are normal in Russia-compared with 35 to 50 in the U.S. At Moscow's Neurosurgical Institute, the entire staff turned out to hear Dr. Hall lecture on the air-powered drills and bone saws...
...cowed by these revelations to care much for sex with either sex, too shocked by adultery to become an adult himself, he cowers at her country estate writing mystical verse. Mama runs off with Uncle Maurice to Australia, and Norman is thrown out in "the cold, frowzy, unseasoned city ether" to begin a series of misadventures while trying to live the life of his perfervid daydreams...
That afternoon, Trimmer and a staff pathologist did an autopsy and noted an odor of ether in the child's lungs. She was not known to have had ether, but the doctors did not mention the odor in their report. They listed "gross pulmonary edema" (waterlogging of the lungs) as the cause of death...
Grey, Then Blue. Nor did Dr. Trimmer mention ether the next morning, when he and Anesthesiologist Lloyd Goodwin were preparing Michael Ketchum, 12, for a hernia operation. Dr. Goodwin injected fluid from the same Surital bottle/and there was the same instant reaction of spasms and coughing. The boy complained that the injection burned, but Dr. Goodwin gave more of the same fluid, and the coughing ceased. The operation went smoothly, and the boy seemed to be doing well...
Where to Put It? Dr. Trimmer took both the old and the new Surital bottles to the lab for analysis. But little analysis was needed. As soon as the older bottle was unstoppered, it reeked with the unmistakable odor of ether-something that had not happened when the cap had only been pierced by a syringe needle. Ether is almost always given by inhalation, and is used intravenously only in the rarest special cases (it inflames the lungs and depresses the heart and nervous system). So how had ether got into the Surital bottle...