Excerpt from Southern California Practitioner, 1915, Vol. 30 Crile's theory Of shock interests us mostly in the way Of suggestions for prevention. Like Groeningen long ago, he recognizes that surgical shock is due to a long series of influences acting before, during and after operation. All of these must be taken into account by the surgeon who aims at a higher suc cess than that which merely sends the patient home alive. The kinetic theory is, shortly, the conservation of energy; shock may be roughly represented by a train of gunpowder lying between the explosive central cell and the torch Of traumatism at the periphery of afferent nerves. In the paper to which I have already referred, I remarked that I had been struck by the absence of shock in abdominal operations done under a local anaesthetic like B Eucaine in hu man beings, though in my operations on cats or rabbits this did not prevent apoplasmia of the blood that was ob served under general anaesthesia. In Crile's Observations, as I understand him, there is a general exhaustion of cerebral (and other) cells, and the area 1s not limited to the bulb, nor, I supt pose, to the motor areas involved in any resistance of the animal to inju rions attacks. We cannot know whether a man whose intellect restrained defeu sive movements would show exhaustion of other or additional groups Of cells, but we do know that without any anaes thetic he would be more profoundly shocked than with. Certainly his moral control would cause fatigue in cells of the higher cerebral centres. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.