WATER 
AS A LOCAL ANAESTHETIC. 
Its Discovery American and not German. WATER AS A LOCAL ANAESTHETIC—ITS DISCOVERY 
AMERICAN AND NOT GERMAN * 
To the Editor of the Medical Record. 
Sir : For some time past an item has been going the rounds of 
the press, both medical and lay, in this country, to the effect that 
a German surgeon, Dr. C. L. Schleich, has recently shown, by ex- 
periments upon himself and his assistants, that water is a local 
anaesthetic, when injected hypodermatically. This first appeared, 
I believe, in the Deutsche Medizinische Zeitung, No. 66, 1891. The 
Medical Record, of September 12, 1891, among other journals, 
briefly mentioned it. 
I have waited since then, expecting as a matter of course that 
some one would come forward to correct the idea that this discovery 
is anything new; for many physicians besides myself must know that 
it is an old story. 
In 1885 I called on Dr. William S. Halsted, then of this city, 
now Surgeon-in-Cliief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Balti- 
more. I was at that time making some investigations in regard to 
local anesthetics, and Dr. Halsted was better informed than 
myself. 
In the course of our conversation Dr. Halsted remarked that 
he had recently been using water by the hypodermatic needle as an 
anesthetic for small operations, and with success; that only the 
day previous he had employed this method in the removal of a 
small tumor from a patient living on the same street in which his 
office was situated; and that he had found that this plan succeeds 
best when the water is thrown into the skin, not beneath it; in other 
words, that the more superficial the incision is to be, the more satis- 
factory will be the anaesthesia by water. 
I was much interested in this statement by Dr. Halsted; and 
in order to satisfy my curiosity as to just how the water obtunded 
‘Reprinted from the N. Y. Medical Recokd of November 14, 1891. sensation, made a few experiments upon my own person. It 
occurred to me that possibly the aneesthesia might be mechanical 
only, and due to pressure by the water upon the sensory nerve- 
endings. In one of these experiments I tried to produce an equal 
or greater amount of pressure by another means, and then see 
whether sensation was abolished thereby. Dr. F. A. Manning, of 
this city, assisted me on this occasion. A hypodermatic needle was 
attached to the tube leading from my compressed-air receiver, 
which had been pumped to a 40-pound pressure. This needle was 
now inserted beneath the skin of my left forearm, and the tap 
turned on slowly. The air distended the sub-cutaneous cellular 
spaces and then stretched the skin to tenseness and the production 
of very considerable increase in circumference of the limb. We 
continued until the crackling feel of sub-cutaneous emphysema 
could be noted, on pressure, from the fingers to and including the 
shoulder; and the skin of the forearm felt to me almost as tight as 
a drum-head. 
The sesthesiometer was used both just before and upon con- 
cluding this experiment; and, briefly, it was shown that while some 
numbness was produced, the sensation was not enough abolished 
to permit of a cutting operation without pain; and that water 
probably has an analgesic property of its own.* 
As an additional evidence, that the idea of analgesia from sub- 
cutaneous use of water is nothing new, I quote the following pas- 
sage from Bartholow’s “Materia Medica,” 5tli edition, 1885, p. 
G90; subject, Aquapuncture : “ It is a remarkable circumstance 
that aquapuncture has the power to relieve pain in a superficial 
nerve. So decided is this effect that there are physicians who hold 
that the curative effect of the hypodermatic injection of morphine 
is due, not to the morphine, but to the water! ” 
Very respectfully, 
Robert H. M. Dawbarn, M. D. 
345 West 56th Street, New York. 
(After May 1st, 105 West 74th Street, New York). 
*For further details see my article on Surgical Emphysema, in Wood’s 
Reference Handbook, vol. ii., p. 678.