Volume 9b - History of Anaesthesia Society

Fhnento8, February \$, and 18,18~19 and in the Madrid dpf;fts
mplarl, February 23 and 'El Heraldo', Fetn-uary 24 and 25.
'El
me use of ether anaesthesia spread so rapidly through Spin that by the
end of Etarch 1847 it had been employed by the great majority of Sp3nish
surgeons. !The best documented series conprises 56 operations carried out
in various cities on patients who were mostly aged under 40 years, the
oldest being 64. Most of t!e operations performed constituted major
surgery at that time, including a number of mastectomies and several
amptations of l*; tooth axtracticms and a few self experiments also
figure on the list. By contrast, we have been able to unearth very
little infomtion about a group of 79 operations carried out in Madrid
and Santiago de Cc~npostela. In Septar 1047, the Real kademia de
Medicine de Madrid awarded Dr Basilio San-Martin a prize for a pper on
ether in which he described 53 cases of ether anaesthesia, 16 of them
experiments he carrisd out on himself while, in Santiago de Ccsnpostela,
Professor Gonzalez Olivaries mentioned on several occasions his
dissatisfaction with the results obtained in 26 operations with ether
anaesthesia that he performed in 1847.
In their first tri3ls of ether anaesthesia, Spanish surgeons
addnistered it either with apparatu? desir~ned by themselves, or using
devices that had become popular in other Wopean countries, such as
those developed by Luer and Charriere (with or without modifications by
the users). The ad hoc apparatuses designed by Mendoza and Arqnmsa were
described in detail in the literature, but without illustrations.
In conclusion, the date of Argwmsals first operation with ether
anaesthesia in Wrid, January 13 1R47, makes *in the fourth country
to have employed this anaesthetic, the first three having keen United
States, United Kingdan and France. We now know about many of the first
Spanish trials thanks partly to the surgeons who reprted their findings
in scientific publications, and partly due to the great interest aroused
by the subject of anaesthesia mng the general pblic, which was echoed
in the daily press of the time.