- Anaesthesia in the 19th century was taking its first steps. Before the first anesthetic in 1842 with ether, no major surgical operations were done with people. Possible amputations or other necessary surgical operations patients had to endure either with under the influence of alcohol or without it where the result usually was that the patient passed out from the pain. Some primitive anaesthetic methods were in use, like squeezing the carotid arteries, from which the patient passed out. But usually in a case of amputation, strong men held the patient in place.
- The leafs of the Peruvian cocaine bush
were known by their stunning effect, even in Europe from the time of Columbus,
but the actual method of the stunning effect in the leafs had not been
researched nearly at all. In the year of 1860 Albert Niemann from the Göttingen
University managed to ennoble white cocaine from the leaf’s of the cocaine
bush. Siegmund Freud on the other hand got interested about this white powder
and thought that it could be used to treat patients, suffering from the morphine
addiction. At the same time, a friend of Freud, oculist Carl Koller was making
his own experiments in order to find a local anaesthetic, which would enable the
doctor to anaesthetize the area around the eye, for the time it would take to
examine and operate the eye. Freyd recommended Koller to try cocaine.
- After a short experiments, where Koller
injected cocaine solution to frogs and to guinea-pigs eye, Koller dared to try
the solution into a patient, who was scheduled for an eye operation. The result
was an excellent one and when Koller presented the results of his experiments in
1884 at the meeting of Heidelberg, the reception was eager. Steward Halsted got
excited about the results of Koller’s experiments and started to develop and
test the cocaine solution even more. He noticed that large areas could be made
numb with the solution, as long as the solution was injected around the central
nerve areas. In over a thousand of Halsted’s case, the cocaine solution proved
to be an effective anaesthetic. The substance which resulted this anaesthetic,
was synthesized from cocaine by Ernst Fourneau and it was called with a name of
Stovaine. It was quickly followed by Procaine in 1904, which was developed by
Alfred Einhorn and is today known better with a name of Novocain, in which
it’s still in use.
- Halsted like many of the pioneers in medical science tried the cocaine solution to himself, which resulted a quick development of an addiction to him. Later Halsted got rid of the addiction, but he was a warning example, what this most effective anaesthetic can achieve at it’s worst.
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