A friend of a dentist getting hurt in a party leads to the use of this as an anesthetic agent!
If you are amazed then its ok! If you laughed, well that is ok too!
In the basement of the building, a large-scale machine was producing a gas under the supervision of a young Humphry Davy, who was encouraged to experiment with new gases for patients to inhale.
The first important work of Davy was examination of this gas and the publication of his results in the book: Researches, Chemical and Philosophical (1800). In that publication, Davy notes the analgesic effect of this gas and its potential to be used for surgical operations.
One of the effects of the inhalation was that it caused the person to laugh at even a bad joke! Now now, I hope the stand up comedians of today do not get any ideas!
The gas was thus called “laughing gas”!
Yes! That was the common name for nitrous oxide!
Despite Davy’s discovery that inhalation of nitrous oxide could relieve a conscious person from pain, another 44 years elapsed before doctors attempted to use it for anaesthesia.
The initial use of nitrous oxide was as a recreational drug at “laughing gas parties”, primarily arranged for the British upper class and this became an immediate success! Guess the British Upper class would do anything to make them laugh! Even if it is not true!
While the effects of the gas generally make the user appear stuporous, dreamy and sedated, some people also “get the giggles” in a state of euphoria, and frequently erupt in laughter!
During one such party when, nitrous oxide was strictly still a party toy and people wanted to laugh like a Hyena; there was an interesting observation.
A friend of a dentist took too much of the stuff at a laughing-gas stage show and gashed his leg real bad! Normally he would have howled in pain like a, well Hyena! But in this case he was not responding normally!
The friend hadn’t realized he’d hurt himself since he had no pain!
The dentist then realised that it could be used as and analgesic anesthesia!
The dentist was Horace Wells who used nitrous oxide for the first time as an anaesthetic drug in the treatment of a patient and in dental surgeries.
Today, nitrous oxide is used in dentistry as an anxiolytic, as an adjunct to local anaesthetic.
Nitrous oxide was not found to be a strong enough anaesthetic for use in major surgery in hospital settings, however. Instead, diethyl ether, being a stronger and more potent anaesthetic, was demonstrated and accepted for use in October 1846, along with chloroform in 1847. But the fact that a gas can be used as an anesthetic agent was first demonstrated by the laughing gas!
And all that happened when an overdosed guy in a stage party hurt himself! Of course let that not be a point in favour of overdosing and getting wild at a party!
Be like the doctor who turned even an accident into a investigation! Talking about doctors do read about the first lady doctor Anandibai Gopalrao Joshi…
An inspiring life indeed…
Now go for the non anesthesia induced natural sleep!
Shubh ratri
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