Word: ethers
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...famed Ether Dome of Massachusetts General Hospital, a blond British electroencephalographer named William Grey Walter unveiled his invention-a yellow box, resembling a deep-freeze unit, full of vacuum tubes, condensers, switches, wires. Walter applied to a patient's head the electrodes of an electroencephalograph (a machine that traces the peaks and valleys of the brain waves, helps to diagnose epilepsy, brain tumors, etc.). Then he attached his analyzing machine to the electroencephalograph...
...Public Health Service, busy searching for a cure for mumps, last week reported a dividend: a vaccine, highly successful in immunizing monkeys, and now being tested with human volunteers. The vaccine uses virus from mumps convalescents; the virus is first cultured in chick embryos, then killed by ether or ultraviolet irradiation...
Morton was not ether's inventor (it had been known since the 16th Century - in the 1830s, "ether frolics" were a popular substitute for drinking), nor even the first to use it in an operation.* But medical historians agree that Morton started the new era in surgery. Three months after his demonstration, surgeons on both sides of the Atlantic were giving ether; the screams and struggles of patients on the operating table had begun to subside...
Modern science has developed dozens of new pain killers (novocaine, spinal blocks, cyclopropane, sodium pentothal, etc.), but ether is still safest and best. Enthusiastic centennial speakers noted that anesthesia has brought many boons to man besides easier human surgery: e.g., it made possible a vast amount of painless experimentation on animals. Now, said Dr. Beecher, a "second power" of anesthesia is emerging-the power of probing the human mind. "With anesthetic agents we seem to have a tool for producing and holding at will different levels of consciousness-a tool that promises to be of great help in studies...
...Georgia's Dr. Crawford W. Long claimed to have operated with ether in 1842, but published no report until 1849; Connecticut's'Dentist Horace Wells used laughing gas (nitrous oxide) in 1844 for tooth-pulling...