/oss/taxonomy/term/1006/all en /oss/article/medical-history/not-laughing-matter <p>When I was growing up, “looning” meant one thing. You would fill a balloon with water and throw it at a target that usually did not welcome such activity. Today, “looning” has taken on another meaning. At music festivals and at raves, those eardrum-blasting, strobe-lighted parties frequented by the under-thirty crowd, it is not unusual to see dancers raise a balloon to their lips. But they are not blowing into it. They are inhaling the gas it contains. It makes them all giddy, justifying the name by which the gas is known. Laughing gas!</p> Wed, 25 Oct 2023 16:03:58 +0000 Joe Schwarcz PhD 9700 at /oss /oss/article/did-you-know-history/introduction-surgical-anesthesia <p>A dentist named Morton claimed that he could produce surgical anesthesia with this miracle compound and that he would demonstrate it at Mass General. With the observation gallery full and the men prepared to hold down the patient as usual during the surgery, the dentist appeared with the anesthesia machine he had invented to administer the ether. For the first time, a patient underwent major surgery while asleep but with his heart and respiration safely intact. Within a month the word had spread and ether became a powerful part of medicine and surgery.</p> Thu, 25 May 2017 00:14:52 +0000 OSS 2492 at /oss /oss/article/health-history-science-science-everywhere/joe-schwarcz-james-simpson-chloroform-pioneer-took-pain-away <p>The experiment, James Simpson decided, would go ahead even though the rabbits had died. And that decision was destined to have such a huge impact on medicine that more than 100,000 grateful Scots lined the streets of Edinburgh in 1870 to pay their respects as Simpson’s funeral cortège passed by. Many had undergone surgery or had given birth to children painlessly thanks to Simpson’s great discovery: chloroform.</p> Sat, 05 Oct 2013 16:17:51 +0000 Joe Schwarcz PhD 2018 at /oss /oss/article/drugs-health-news/ether-was-potent-painkiller-it-was-hit-revellers <p>The marble and granite statue in the Boston Common depicts a physician in medieval clothing holding a cloth next to the face of a man who seems to have passed out. An inscription on the base of the statue reads “To commemorate that the inhaling of ether causes insensibility to pain, first proved to the world at the Mass. General Hospital in Boston, October A.D. 1846.” No names are mentioned.</p> Wed, 22 Jun 2016 10:12:58 +0000 Joe Schwarcz PhD 2342 at /oss /oss/article/drugs-health-history/what-natural-substance-was-first-local-anesthetic-be-introduced-medicine <p style="text-align:justify">Cocaine. Credit for the discovery of cocaine as a local anesthetic is usually attributed to Dr. Carl Koller, an Austrian opthamologist who in 1884 demonstrated that dropping a solution of cocaine into the eyes of frogs and guinea pigs produced a local anesthetic effect. He then went on to experiment on some of his colleagues and on himself, clearly proving that cocaine drops effectively desensitized the eye. While Koller was the first to use cocaine as an anesthetic in eye surgery, he was not the first to note the local anesthetic effect of the compound that occurs naturally in the leaves of the south American coca plant. That honour actually goes to Friedrich Wohler, the German chemist who is regarded as the father of modern organic chemistry. Wohler had garnered scientific fame by making urea, a compound found in human urine, from ingredients that did not come from living sources. With this single experiment he destroyed the notion that substances found in living systems, which at the time were referred to as “organic,” could not be reproduced in the laboratory because they contained some sort of “vital force.”</p> <p><a href="http://blogs.mcgill.ca/oss/2013/05/06/what-natural-substance-was-the-first-local-anesthetic-to-be-introduced-into-medicine">Read more</a></p> Mon, 06 May 2013 21:55:21 +0000 Joe Schwarcz PhD 1933 at /oss