Anesthesiology
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After Morton's demonstration in the Ether Dome of the Massachusetts General Hospital, anesthesia for surgery was accepted around the world at a speed unusually fast for any medical or scientific innovation. However, the concept of surgical anesthesia had been rejected on four occasions during the preceding 40 years. The rapid acceptance of anesthesia in 1846 appears to have had a political and social basis as well as medical. ⋯ First was a change in the perception of disease and pain; both lost religious connotations and became biologic phenomena as part of a process of secularization that affected all aspects of Western society. Second was the growth of a sense of well-being and progress, which imbued patients and physicians alike with confidence in their ability to control natural processes. During the last half century, pain has remained secular, but the confidence in both progress and the ability to control nature may have diminished.
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Following the administration of a single 0.1 mg/kg dose of vecuronium bromide, satisfactory conditions for tracheal intubation developed in 156 +/- 12 s (mean +/- SEM), and the clinical duration of the initial dose was 36 +/- 2 min. When the initial dose of vecuronium was administered in two increments, a 0.015 mg/kg "priming" dose, followed 6 min later by a 0.050 mg/kg "intubating" dose, intubation time decreased to 61 +/- 3 s and clinical duration to 21 +/- 1 min. ⋯ With the described technique, comparable intubating conditions could be obtained just as rapidly with vecuronium as with succinylcholine chloride, without subjecting the patients to the side effects of and the complications occasionally encountered with succinylcholine. An added advantage of the use of a priming dose is that it will reveal undiagnosed, pathologic, or idiopathic increase of sensitivity to nondepolarizing muscle relaxants.
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Distribution of ventilation and perfusion in relation to ventilation-perfusion ratio (VA/Q) were studied in 14 patients, with a mean age of 59 yr, before elective lung surgery, in the supine position when awake, during intravenous anesthesia and mechanical ventilation with air, after increasing the fraction of inspired oxygen (FIO2) to 0.5, and in the lateral position. Before anesthesia, small inert gas shunts and perfusion of low VA/Q regions, indicating some degree of VA/Q mismatch, were observed in several patients. ⋯ In the lateral position, the shunt was 4.0% and increases in ventilation to high VA/Q regions were observed. The lack of marked changes in the VA/Q distribution after induction either could be a result of only minor alterations in the distribution of ventilation and perfusion or an effective vascular response to alveolar hypoxia (hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction, HPV).