Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness, Hardcover

Descriere

``With Anesthesia, Kate Cole-Adams has given us a gift. She explores not only the concepts but the characters who hope to understand the shadowy world of the anesthetized mind. However, Cole-Adams transforms from being an observer to a fellow journeyer, providing authentic insight and transmitting the excitement of those who believe that these drugs are ethereal keys that could unlock the vault of consciousness itself.`` --George Mashour, author of Neuroscientific Foundations of Anesthesiology Anesthetize to render insensible. First there's the injection, then counting backwards from ten--and the next thing you know, you're awake. Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness is the story of the time in between, an exploration of that most crucial and baffling gift of modern medicine: the disappearing act that enables us to undergo procedures which would otherwise be impossibly, often fatally, painful. It is among the most crucial and baffling gifts of modern medicine. In the past 150 years, anesthesia has made surgical intervention routine, from open-heart surgery to the facelift. But how much do anesthesiologists really know about what happens when their patients go under? Can we hear and retain what's going on? Is pain still pain if we don't remember it? How does the unconscious mind deal with the body's experience of being sliced open and ransacked--and how can we help ourselves through it all? Kate Cole-Adams interweaves her own surgery and its aftermath with the explorations and personal accounts of others, doctors and patients alike--accounts of people who wake under the knife, who experience traumantic reactions, dreams, hallucinations, and submerged memories--accounts that evoke and illuminate the provisional nature of the self. Haunting, lyrical, sometimes shattering, Cole-Adams leavens science with personal experience, and brings an intensely human curiosity to the unknowable realm beyond consciousness.