The History of Various Anastethics and Remedies....

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sbrothy
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Disclaimer: I have no medical training or schooling.

I know my website is a mess. I'm investing more time in the English version than in the Danish, which might be a little silly as my intended audience really is here at home in Denmark.

Unfortunately my laptop can hardly run Visual Studio connected to github. Sometimes waiting for a semicolon takes 30 seconds or more. Sometimes the computer just blanks out and shuts down, overwhelmed.

As the site is about drugs it dawned upon me (after seeing Gladiator 2 and seeing the lanista's medicus administering "Dragon's Breath" to a wounded gladiator (the protagonist of course) which appears to be scopolamine. He administers that and opium for sewing a wound up (which strikes me as a little soft for a hardcore gladiator getting 20-30 stings. Couldn't he just bite hard down on a stick?! :smile: ) The medicus mentions infection (while I I think tetanus would be up there along with it although they perhaps wouldn't know the difference) although I fail to see how scopolamine and opium would be of help there (with infection I mean).

Anyway, scopolamine seems to be a pre-op drug, which among other things, decreases the production of saliva but without much anesthetic effect in itself (unless the combination with opium produces some synergetic effect I havent't heard of).

The film is what it is: popcorn entertainment. It just got me thinking about how far back the knowledge of remedies like scopolamine, digitalis, cannabis, and especially opium really reaches...?

Yeah, I know I can research this myself - and I will - but perhaps we have some historians or doctors here with innate (EDIT: OK, "innate" didn't mean what I thought it did. Why yes it did!) knowledge they're ready to share with a stupid like me.

EDIT: Ech, I'm gonna leave some parantheses here for you to disperse over my "text" above: (((((((((())))))))))).
 
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You might enjoy

An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug, Cocaine​

https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Addiction-Sigmund-William-Halsted/dp/1400078792/?tag=pfamazon01-20

It is about how Freud and Halsted got addicted to cocaine researching anesthetics. Halsted was important in the development of US surgical practice and the author postulates that Halsted developed surgical teams so that he could continue to conduct successful surgeries despite his addiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted
 
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Frabjous said:
You might enjoy

An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug, Cocaine​

https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Addiction-Sigmund-William-Halsted/dp/1400078792/?tag=pfamazon01-20

It is about how Freud and Halsted got addicted to cocaine researching anesthetics. Halsted was important in the development of US surgical practice and the author postulates that Halsted developed surgical teams so that he could continue to conduct successful surgeries despite his addiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted
Yeah, Freud - and presumably many of his contemporaries - used OTC cocaine and laudanum to an extent that would get them instantly "cancelled" in our day and age.