Surgeon at Med School Makes Anesthesia Find

A major finding by a doctor at the Harvard Medical School may revolutionize the administration of anesthetics to patients awaiting surgery.

If current applications of the new discovery prove successful, doctors will be able to administer ether into the blood stream intravenously, Dr. M. Judah Folkman, instructor in Surgery at the Harvard Medical School and discoverer of the new process, said yesterday. Presently, doctors must administer ether to patients orally.

The new intravenous process would make anesthesia safer and easier to give. It would also substantially reduce the cost of anesthesia by replacing a $500 machine with a $5 plastic coil.

Important Effects

In addition to use in operations the new anesthetic technique will have important effects on other illnesses. Anesthetics could more easily be used on patients suffering from lung diseases. The new technique would enable these people whose diseased lungs are injured by inhaling ether to undergo pro-longed previously forbidden anesthesia.

Also patients with multiple burns could have dressings painlessly removed without having to be moved to the operating room. The finding could also be used to cure the pain of patients suffering from cancer.

Folkman foresees the use of his new technique by combat medics, and said that it might be used in Vietnam.

He made his discovery accidently while cleaning silicone tubing he was using in a cancer experiment. He found the tubing still smelled of ether after it had been washed and dried.

Further tests led Folkman to discover that ether could pass through silicone at a constant and measurable rate.

From these preliminary experiments, he devised a method of administering anesthesia by attaching a coil to two major blood vessels of dogs. Blood would flow through the coil and past a silicone tube filled with ether.

Because the rate the ether passes through the silicone tubing can be measured, the size of the anesthetic dose can be controlled by the thickness of the tubing used. For use on human beings, the coil would probably be attached to the patients wrist.

A group of doctors is now still testing the process on dogs. So far these experiments have been highly successful.

"This is almost like a new drug, so we want to carry out extensive experiments before we allow it to be used commercially," Folkman said.