Page:The First Anesthetic, the Story of Crawford Long - Frank Kells Boland.djvu/16

4 parts were completed in a minute or two. It seems that the forefathers in surgery felt that the use of agents to relieve pain was a confession of weakness on the part of the operator. In all his work Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, did not deign to mention avoidance of operative tortures, while Galen, a few centuries later, declared that he abhorred drugs to alleviate pain.

Helenium was one of the first soporific drugs described. Homer said it had its origin in the tears of Helen and was to be taken in wine. Though considered a mythological concoction, fit subject for poetry only, such a drug may have existed; for, as Emerson says, myths and legends were once history. It has probably always been known that wine and later, stronger alcoholic drinks, may be responsible for varying degrees of narcosis, but were not to be depended upon for anesthesia.

As an anesthetic, mandragora (mandrake, podophillin) probably has been written about more than any other of the drugs of early days. Shakespeare has Cleopatra exclaim, "Give me to drink mandragora that I might sleep out this great gap of time my Anthony is away." Pliny the Elder, who perished in the destruction of Herculaneum, in A.D. 79, in describing the plant mandragora, says, "It has a soporific power on the faculty of those who drink it; the ordinary potion is half a cup. It is drank against serpents, and before cutting and puncturing, lest they should be felt." It was the most widely used narcotic drug, said to be the ancient equivalent of modern belladonna, the sedative effects of which are not recognized today. From all accounts, however, the older drug must have been more potent as a soporific; but Dioscorides, who recommended it for anesthesia, does not report a single case in which it was actually employed. This celebrated physician of the first century A.D. served for a time in the army of Nero and was the first to use the word