Contribution of William Morton to Anesthesia-Samples for Students

Question: Discuss in detail about the code of Hammurabi. Explain in detail about the contribution of William Morton to Anesthesia. Answer: Code of Hammurabi One of the earliest and old written complete legal codes in the world is the code of Hammurabi. This code was written by the Babylonian king Hammurabi who ruled the dynasty from the 1792 to 1750 BC. According to the rules, a collection of 282 rule established standards for illegal practices. The code declared fines and punishments to the guilty. All the codes were mentioned in the if-then tense. The code consisted many harsh punishments, sometimes amputation of body parts as a punishment to the guilty. It also provides some of the first examples where accused considered innocent until the crime is proved (Pritchard 2016). The black stone encompassing the code of Hammurabi was imprinted from a single, four-ton block of diorite, a durable yet very difficult for carving. The stone which is divided in two parts, the first half of the stone of about two and a half feet describes about the god of justice Shamash. The rest of the stone consisting of chiseled cuneiform script. William Mortons contribution to Anesthesia. Willian Thomas Green Morton a former student of dental science, was once suggested that ether can be used instead of nitrous oxide for pain removal. He experimented ether and quickly realized that it can be used for anesthetic surgery. The machine he developed, used simple glass globe that housed an ether drenched sponge (Desai and Desai 2015). The patient had to simply inhale the vapors, coming through the globes outlet to achieve intoxicated stage (for not feeling in pain). On October 16,1846 (Pritchard 2016). he used it on a patient and the patient was successfully anesthetized. This became a revolutionary idea; modern generation Anesthesia later came was based on this idea. References Desai, M.S. and Desai, S.P., 2015. Discovery of Modern Anesthesia: A Counterfactual Narrative about Crawford W. Long, Horace Wells, Charles T. Jackson, and William TG Morton.AANA journal,83(6), p.411. Pritchard, J.B. ed., 2016.Ancient Near Eastern texts relating to the Old Testament with supplement. Princeton University Press