Word: anesthesia
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Troubling Voices. Dr. Kolouch was as skeptical of hypnosis at first as most surgeons. But increasing use of it by reputable medical men, mainly in obstetrics and in special cases to reduce the amount of chemical anesthesia needed, persuaded him two years ago to give it a try. He read up on it, then worked for a while with a San Francisco expert...
...quartz that the patient holds suspended from a chain. Dr. Kolouch arranges signals that will get the patient into a hypnotic trance promptly when needed in the future. He then assures the patient that he will feel nothing during the operation, that he will awake from the anesthesia with only minimum discomfort, and that he will soon be able to go back to work...
Equally important, Dr. Kolouch instructs the patient that while under anesthesia he will not listen to any conversation that is not aimed directly at him. Dr. Kolouch became convinced of the need for this after observing cases in which the operation was a success but the patient inexplicably made a poor recovery. Hypnotizing one such patient later, a colleague was startled to have her quote back to him verbatim a remark he had made while she was under anesthesia; she had misconstrued the remark as a bad omen for herself. Dr. Kolouch believes that even a sudden silence...
...described by Dr. White, a tiny electrode is inserted into each frontal lobe of the brain with the patient under general anesthesia. Once in place the electrode tips lie in the "inferior medial" white matter of the lobe, with the thread-thin wires, insulated by lacquer and fine teflon tubing, projecting through the scalp. When the electrodes are attached to the high-frequency electrical current, Dr. White explained, lesions, formed by coagulation of tissue, are created in the area. The process takes from five to 10 seconds. Additional lesions are created at intervals of several days by withdrawing the electrodes...
...playing the male nurse among what he called the "huge swarms of dear, wounded, sick and dying boys." Yet, if he had not visited them, the child soldiery in the wards would, for the most part, have been utterly alone with the horrors of 1860 surgery, infection and anesthesia. He liked to "buss" them and hold hands after lights out, but to the Ohio farm boys lying maimed in the long sheds, a whiskery buss from the poet who brought candy and read letters was probably just one more puzzling event in a confusing war. Whitman knew his own nature...