Lawrence J. Saidman — The Wondrous Story of Anesthesia

Автор: Lawrence J. Saidman
Название книги: The Wondrous Story of Anesthesia
Формат: PDF
Тема: Анестезиология
Страницы: 930
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This story describes events in three succeeding eras: first, events during the time preceding and immediately after the demonstration of anesthesia; then those in the subsequent 90 years of slow evolution of the specialty, ending in the 1950s; and finally those from the 1950s to the present, a period of explosive growth. Our lives span the last of these, the era in which modern anesthesia evolved from empiricism—“doing what worked”—to a practice relying on science and evidenced-based medicine. We sought to tell this story before too many grand participants died or were unable to tell their story. Many died in the past decade: Safar (2003); Marx (2004); Greene (2005)—including since we began this project in 2007—Haglund, Ibsen and Keats (2007); Gray (2008); Parsloe (2009); Smith and Terrell (2010); Gordh, Morris and Pierce (2011). We would have lost too many opportunities had we failed to act.
We enlisted 100 authors to construct 53 chapters (The Individual Stories) describing specific aspects of the evolution of anesthesia: people, countries, drugs, science, organizations, education, and more, each a thread in the tapestry of a larger story, each chapter written by anesthetists and others who lived this history. These 53 chapters make up the second part of our book. The first part wove stories from these chapters into chronologies described in 14 additional chapters (The Woven Stories) which provide a coherent picture of the development of anesthesia, a framework that facilitates an understanding of how events and people described in the second part of the book jointly shaped the development of the specialty.