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The Advance of Anaesthesia
Published in A.J. Youngson, The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine, 2018
During 1847 many doctors were at work trying to obtain a better and a safer agent than ether. Thomas Nunneley experimented systematically with over 40 substances and discovered several new anaesthetics, but they were either dangerous, or expensive and difficult to produce. Half-way through the year Sir William Lawrence at St Bartholomew’s was using an agent known to him as chloric ether, i.e. chloroform dissolved in rectified spirit; had he had the requisite knowledge of chemistry, he could have concentrated this chloric ether and obtained chloroform. John Snow, a brilliant experimental scientist and physician, was also working on the problem. In this company Simpson had few advantages except boldness and energy. He knew as much physiology as the next man (which was not much in 1847) but rather little chemistry; and he was certainly not, by training or inclination, an experimental scientist. One of his comments on ether was, ‘I have taken it myself to try its effects. It is the only way of judging it’, and this was the path along which he proceeded. He tried inhaling a whole series of volatile fluids – acetone, ethyl nitrate, benzin, vapour of iodform, and so on. The process was anything but safe, as one of his suppliers, the Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh, later testified: On one occasion he came into my laboratory to ask whether I had any new substance likely to produce anaesthesia. My assistant, Dr Guthrie, had just prepared a volatile liquid, bibromide of ethylene, which I thought worthy of experiment. Simpson, who was brave to rashness in his experiments, wished to try it upon himself in my private room. This I absolutely refused to allow, and declined to give him any of the liquid unless he promised me first to try its effects on rabbits. Two were procured, and under the vapour quickly passed into anaesthesia, coming out of it in due course. Next day Simpson proposed to experiment upon himself and his assistant with this liquid, but the latter suggested that they should first see how the rabbits had fared. They were both found to be dead…38
Molecular mechanisms of ethanol biotransformation: enzymes of oxidative and nonoxidative metabolic pathways in human
Published in Xenobiotica, 2020
Grażyna Kubiak-Tomaszewska, Piotr Tomaszewski, Jan Pachecka, Marta Struga, Wioletta Olejarz, Magdalena Mielczarek-Puta, Grażyna Nowicka
The formation of ethyl phosphate and ethyl nitrite plays a marginal role in the non-oxidative biotransformation of ethanol. The first of them, according to the hypothesis of Tomaszewski and Buchowicz (1972), is formed in the liver as a result of ethanolysis of endogenous phosphate esters. The presence of small concentrations of ethyl nitrate was found in the blood of smokers consuming ethanol, formed as a result of oxidation of ethanol by peroxynitrite (Dinis-Oliveira, 2016).