Word: spinal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...method involves the ticklish business of getting a needle into the caudal canal through a puncture just above the coccyx at the base of the spine. The mis take of getting needle and anesthetic into the spinal canal, a little higher up, or between the wrong layers of tissue, may prove fatal. Milder risks are a broken needle in the caudal canal, or a useless injection under the skin...
...method of effecting painless childbirth by continued injections of metycaine in the caudal area just below the spinal column (TIME, Sept. 14) last week won approval in the Journal of the A.M.A. and hit the front pages of big U.S. dailies. Wrote Journal Editor Morris Fishbein for the Chicago Times: "The young physicians who developed this method [have] attained a goal long sought by mankind-and especially desired by womankind-since the beginnings of human life...
Most thought the method too new for general publicity, some refused to discuss the anesthetic, some feared the injection would be dangerous because of the needle's nearness to the spinal column. Dr. George W. Kosmak of Manhattan, editor of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, said he had no doubt of the method's scientific value, "but it is one of those extremely dangerous things that need the utmost caution...
...been tried in nearly 600 cases with no maternal deaths and only three infant deaths "without reference to the method of analgesia . . . employed." Cases include the wives of Drs. Waldo Edwards and Robert Hingson, who perfected the method. They deny that continuous caudal anesthesia is any more dangerous than spinal anesthesia-both injections must be done by experts. In the A.M.A. Journal two Chicago doctors reported that caudal anesthesia slowed up delivery in their 20 cases because the patient "has absolutely no urge to bear down." But Drs. Edwards and Hingson believe it speeded labor in their series...
Anesthetics, Old Style. Anesthesia has progressed from chloroform to cyclopropane and local and spinal anesthesia. Dr. Erdmann remembers giving anesthetics for the afternoon clinics during his internship when "most of our patients were truck drivers, wharfmen and the like with strong whiskey, gin or tobacco breaths. We would clap a bootleg cone or a lamp-chimney cone over the face and push the anesthesia until the patient was deep blue...