Der Anaesthesist
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Historical Article
[Premedication, preoperative and postoperative visits. Importance as reflected in anaesthesiology textbooks].
Proceeding from German and English language textbooks on anaesthesia as sources, this article asks what concepts of preoperative and postoperative visits have dominated since 1880 and what types of premedication have been preferred. The idea of obligatory premedication became widespread in the first third of the twentieth century. ⋯ Much less attention was devoted to the postoperative visit. The current emphasis on the postoperative visit in the framework of perioperative anaesthesia is barely dealt with at all in the textbooks that were consulted.
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A case is presented of spontaneous return of circulation after cardiac arrest in a patient with a pacemaker without intraoperative resuscitation. In the literature this kind of situation is called the Lazarus phenomenon. ⋯ Afterwards the patient was transferred to the intensive care unit but died 2 days later without regaining consciousness. The pathophysiological mechanisms for the Lazarus phenomenon are poorly understood but several mechanisms and multifactorial events are discussed in the literature.