The History of Various Anesthetics 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.
 
Also, I read that when Hermann Göring were arrested he was carrying Germany's entire supply of dihydrocodeine (~40.000 doses but I'm pretty much guessing here). The allies had to cure him of his addiction before he could stand trial. We all know how that ended. He had another little pill stashed away.

One of the last concerts arranged by Albert Speer had girls of age <10 walking around with bows in their hair and offering cyanide-capsules to the guests as they left. I hope this story is apocryphal but nothing suprises me anymore. (I may have mentioned this before somewhere. Sometimes you loose track.)
 
sbrothy said:
Disclaimer: I have no medical training or schooling
My dentist needs to have that put on a T shirt for himself. I would also add, "especially analgesics."

(I've just had a painful & lengthy extraction so I'm tetchy)

In line with the thread topic, I would like to add Dentistry to the thread as a branch of medicine and pain management.

I know that barbers were dentists in the UK at some point before medicine was developed, hair cut and a tooth pulled as a sort of job lot.
Perhaps the discipline has moved on a little.
Obviously biting down on something to help with pain was not an option. Presumably alcohol was used?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_surgeon

Modern dentists used cocaine, then lidocaine, not sure if they still use nitrous oxide. You can pay more to be sedated these days, a combination of a strong painkiller like fentanyl and a tranquilizer. They use that combo for some exploratory surgery so it could be the same for dentistry.

An article here, the abstract made me smile.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9275172/

EDIT: From Ai which cites the BBC, "Science museum group" and "the Bulgarian society of medical sciences,"

"Alcohol: Patients were frequently given large quantities of strong spirits, ale, or wine to dull the senses and induce a semi-conscious state before a procedure.
Physical Restraint: Because these early natural analgesics were unreliable and frequently caused overdoses, the primary method of coping with surgery involved sheer willpower. Assistants forcefully held the patient down while the surgeon operated."
 
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pinball1970 said:
My dentist needs to have that put on a T shirt for himself. I would also add, "especially analgesics."

(I've just had a painful & lengthy extraction so I'm tetchy)

In line with the thread topic, I would like to add Dentistry to the thread as a branch of medicine and pain management.

I know that barbers were dentists in the UK at some point before medicine was developed, hair cut and a tooth pulled as a sort of job lot.
Perhaps the discipline has moved on a little.
Obviously biting down on something to help with pain was not an option. Presumably alcohol was used?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_surgeon

Modern dentists used cocaine, then lidocaine, not sure if they still use nitrous oxide. You can pay more to be sedated these days, a combination of a strong painkiller like fentanyl and a tranquilizer. They use that combo for some exploratory surgery so it could be the same for dentistry.

An article here, the abstract made me smile.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9275172/

EDIT: From Ai which cites the BBC, "Science museum group" and "the Bulgarian society of medical sciences,"

"Alcohol: Patients were frequently given large quantities of strong spirits, ale, or wine to dull the senses and induce a semi-conscious state before a procedure.
Physical Restraint: Because these early natural analgesics were unreliable and frequently caused overdoses, the primary method of coping with surgery involved sheer willpower. Assistants forcefully held the patient down while the surgeon operated."
I have a couple of fun (YMMV) stories about dentists, both real and fictional, but I'll wait till you come down from your botched sedation. :woot:

Oh, and I'm sorry to hear you ended up in the clutches of such an amateur. Incidentally, have you seen the movie "The Marathon Man"?
 
sbrothy said:
Also, I read that when Hermann Göring were arrested he was carrying Germany's entire supply of dihydrocodeine (~40.000 doses but I'm pretty much guessing here). The allies had to cure him of his addiction before he could stand trial. We all know how that ended. He had another little pill stashed away.

One of the last concerts arranged by Albert Speer had girls of age <10 walking around with bows in their hair and offering cyanide-capsules to the guests as they left. I hope this story is apocryphal but nothing suprises me anymore. (I may have mentioned this before somewhere. Sometimes you loose track.)

Heh, I looked up apocryphal just to be sure I used it correctly (seems I did). But one synonym is "spurious" which I knew but I wan't aware of this particular meaning:

3
: born to parents not married to each other

So I guess saying that a child is spurious is a somewhat more polite way of calling it a bastard(?)!