Medicine: After Gas

Despite a century-long, varied experience with anesthetics, only last week did doctors seem to have a definitive, rational explanation for the insanity which occasionally follows the use of the first of anesthetics, nitrous oxide (“laughing gas”). The reporters: Drs. Frank Rodolph Ford, 44; Frank Burton Walsh, 41; and James Armstead Jarvis, 33; reporting in the Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Their case: A healthy young man, after a hernia operation, “under nitrous oxide and other anesthesia suffered apraxia [inability to handle objects], aphasia [loss of speech], reduction of vision, loss of visual fixation and moderately severe cerebellar ataxia [loss of muscular co-ordination]. The aphasia and apraxia disappeared after several weeks but the ataxia and reduction of vision persisted for more than six months.”

Their conclusions: Laughing gas injured the tissues of this patient’s brain at the sides, top and rear. These real injuries were probably due to the anesthetic gas alone. But the deprivation of oxygen which any gaseous anesthetic brings about in the cells of the brain may have contributed to the ill effect. The Johns Hopkins doctors have “the impression that nitrous oxide anesthesia is more apt to injure the nervous system than other anesthetics.”