"Too Large a Price"

Doctors who use spinal anesthesia freely got a sharp warning last week from Manhattan's famed Neurologist Foster Kennedy. Reporting, with two colleagues, on cases seen recently at Bellevue Hospital, Dr. Kennedy described several kinds of paralysis resulting from damage to the spinal cord during anesthesia.

Often, the doctors contended in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, the damage appears long after the operation, so it is not traced to its cause and seldom gets into the statistics of spinal anesthesia's harmful side effects.*

Concluded Dr. Kennedy and colleagues: "Spinal anesthesia is accompanied by many definite and terrible dangers which are far too little appreciated by surgeons and anesthetists. From a neurological point of view, we give the opinion that spinal anesthesia should be rigidly reserved for those patients unable to accept a local or general anesthetic. Paralysis below the waist is too large a price for a patient to pay in order that the surgeon should have a fine relaxed field of operation."

* Doctors do not agree on the figures. Some report deaths in three cases out of 4,000; others in no cases out of 250,895.

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