PubMed1974
The application of the principles of basic sciences in anesthesiology not only has succeeded in allaying man's pain on Earth, but also within this decade has provided him with a controlled safe environment for successive journeys into outer space and to the moon and soon to planets beyond. These same principles have made possible his exploration of the ocean floors in artifical atmospheres and pressures and his escape, without breathing devices, from depths of 300 feet. The science of anesthesia has contributed immeasurably to the active treatment of paralytic poliomyelitis and to resuscitation. Furthermore, it has introduced needless jet injection for drug and vaccine therapy in epidemics and with increasing rapidity to diabetcs. This accumulating body of knowledge within the past 13 decades has contributed to the development of modern surgery, obstetrics, and dentistry, and provided techniques for the control of pain from metastatic cancer, from trauma, from arthritis, and during postoperative convalescence. The anesthesiologist shares with the surgeon and clinical pathologist the responsibility for the safe use of fluid and blood replacement therapy; and with the internist, psychiatrist, and general practitioner the proper sequential medication of analgesics, anesthetics, ataractics, cortisone, antihypertensive and antihistaminic agents, and prompt reversal of many undesirable depressions during emergence. A new concept is the reversal of many narcotic states with cyclic AMP. Major advances in anesthesia have been developed on every continent. The fact that there are at least 30 anesthetic techniques and 62 agents in worldwide use reemphasizes our present lack of an ideal single anesthetic agent and technique. Iti is encouraging to note that the science of anesthesiology has made more progress during the past three decades than in all of the previous century. The great preponderance of that progress has been largely confined to Canada, the United States, the British Commonwealth, Western Europe, and a few of the metropolitan areas in South America. Happily, the significant progress in the last decade has added monitors and other safeguards, understanding, tecyniques, agents, and pioneer investigators, in increasing proportions for a world that will double its population in the present half-century. Surely, there is no more important field toward the direction of world scientific effort for human betterment than in this broad area of universal agreement.