Anaesthesia and intensive care
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Richard Gordon (1921-2017) was a prolific writer of both humorous fiction and historical reviews. He trained in medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital (Barts) in London and specialised in anaesthesia working at Hill End Hospital, St Albans (where a large proportion of Barts work took place to avoid the impact of the Blitz during the Second World War) and at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford with Robert Macintosh. ⋯ His gift for writing and his prominent public persona placed him in a unique position to highlight the importance of the newly emerging speciality of anaesthesia. He did the exact opposite of this and instead created a representation of an uninterested spectator to surgical activity, a representation which still persists in some quarters today.
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Anaesth Intensive Care · Dec 2022
Inspiration from inhalation: Poetry about anaesthesia in Australian newspapers in 1847-1848.
An anonymous poem and a cartoon about etherisation were published in Bell's Life in Sydney on 26 June 1847, less than 3 weeks after ether was first administered in Sydney, New South Wales. Almost a year later, an Adelaide newspaper, The South Australian Register, reproduced a poem about chloroform from the British satirical magazine Punch. This poem, 'The Blessings of Chloroform', has been attributed to Percival Leigh, a British medical practitioner who became a comic writer.