1890 Coca and its Therapeutic Application by Angelo Mariani

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M. Laborde, in attributing the secondary peripheric analgesia of intravenous or subcutaneous injections of hydrochlorate of Cocaine to the cerebral insusceptibil ity to pain, unconsciously made Cocaine a gfeneral anaes thetic. Prof. Arloing(1885, Memoire Soc. Biologie)has undertaken: many experiments for demonstrating that Cocaine is not a general anaesthetic. In his experiments, the learned physiologist of Lyons confirmed the results obtained by Vulpian as to the modifi cations occasioned by Cocaine of the arterial pressure ; he saw, like his predecessors,the excito-medullary and con- vulsary effect of large doses of Cocaine and the increase of the salivary secretion, and in regard to its cerebro-spinal effect,he compared it to strychnine. General analgesia did not occur except from fatal doses or when accompanied by convulsions. The hydrochlorate of Cocaine, according to M.Arloing, produces and can produce nothing but local anaesthesia by temporarily changing the physical properties of the protoplasm of the terminal and fibrillary nervous elements easily accessible to medicinal agents in the cor nea and mucous surfaces. We will presently show that the several learned men who have been engaged in investigating the mechanism of action of the active principles of Coca were by no means in accord as regards the inodtis agetidi of Cocaine in the production of local anaesthesia. While M.Dujardin-Beaumetz likens the local anaesthetic action of Cocaine to that of cold, and while M.Laborde considers that it produces a diminished blood supply by the vaso-constrictor action of the great sympathetic nervous system, M.Arloing, on the contrary, explains it by a local action on the nervous protoplasm. Moreover,in 1886, Schilling, a supporter of the vascular theory, advised inhalations of nine drops of nitrite of amyl,in three doses, inhalations which caused dilatation