This article points out the severe limitations of using Wikipedia for any serious literature review or source. Anyone can edit it.
It may be okay for a high school project, but, with all respect, as you go forward in your career, never cite Wikipedia.
As one example, it is true that anesthesia is really a dental invention. Both Horace Wells and W. T. G. Morton used their agents (nitrous oxide and di-ethyl ether) on patients for a dental procedure before they demonstrated them at Harvard.
However, the article states:
"In 1945, oral and maxillofacial surgeon, Dr. Niels Jorgensen was first to develop intravenous moderate sedation. His technique, administering pentobarbital, meperidine and scopolamine intravenously, was widely accepted and first taught at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, beginning in 1945."
There are so many things wrong with this sentence. First, in the last century, most oral surgeons performed general anesthetics, not "moderate sedation". It was sometimes called "deep sedation", but there is little difference between deep sedation and general anesthesia.
Intravenous barbiturate anesthesia was pioneered in Southern California in the mid-1930s by Orlan K. Bullard, D.D.S., and Barkley Wykoff, D.D.S.
The first oral surgery resident to receive formal (institutional) anesthesia training was Adrian O. Hubbell, D.D.S. at the Mayo Clinic in the c. 1938-1939. Thiopental had been introduced into widespread clinical practice by John Lundy, M.D. at Mayo, and Hubbell spent one year (out of his three years in residency) on the medical anesthesia service. Dr. Hubbell finished his residency at Mayo in 1940 and joined Berto Olson, D.D.S. in Los Angeles. Over the course of a year, Dr. Hubbell succeeded in converting Dr. Olson's nitrous oxide practice into an intravenous anesthesia practice.
In 1941, Adrian Hubbell started his own private practice in Long Beach, California, where he gave thiopental to 55 patients a day, six days a week. I am sure Dr. Hubbell and Dr. Jorgensen were friends. Hubbell wrote many of the early papers on adminstration of thiopental (and later methohexital). For example, he described using low doses of succinylcholine in the treatment of laryngospasms.
Thiopental, the precursor to propofol, was the main induction agent in hospitals for general anesthesia up to the early 1990s. And in the mid-1950s, there was more thiopental administered in oral surgery offices in the United States than in hospitals.
en.m.wikipedia.org
