Word: nitrous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...electrocardiogram could be taken and shown on a TV-type screen. Dr. Didier worked a thin plastic tube through the President's throat and down his windpipe to deliver the anesthetic. Anesthetics must be chosen with special care for a patient with Johnson's heart-attack history; nitrous oxide offered the advantage of inducing only light anesthesia, so that the patient wakes up with a minimum of hangover. Dr. Didier had to use an especially thin tube to leave room for what else had to go down the presidential throat: a laryngoscope (see diagram), 2.5 centimeters in diameter...
...Varieties of Religious Experience, William James had this to say about his experience with nitrous oxide: "Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. They may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give...
...inhalation of nitrous oxide made Hegelian philosophy some-what comprehensible--wonder of wonders!--to James. "What reader of Hegel," he writes, "can doubt that the sense of a perfected Being with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods. . .? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level, and the Aufgabe of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel's intellect by mystical feeling." The bizarre consequences of the Hegelian system when applied to brute Anglo-American "facts" tend to vanish...
From personal experimentation with nitrous oxide James received what he emphatically believed to be a form of mystical experience. Trances and other exceptional mental states preoccupied his attention for many years. Throughout his career, in fact, James was unflaggingly open-minded about seances, mind cures, and other academic black sheep. His conclusions regarding the nature of myticism might reasonably be considered an important key to his own religious interests and hope...
Multiple Medicines. Since the swashbuckling practitioners of a century ago popularized ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") in surgery and dentistry, the anesthetic art has become vastly more complex and has developed into a new specialty. Only an M.D. can be an anesthesiologist. Except in emergencies, he studies the patient in advance of operations, to decide what anesthetics will be safest and most effective...