Anaesthetic Quotes & Sayings

Then there was a hard brown lozenge called the Tonsil Tickler. The Tonsil Tickler tasted and smelled very strongly of chloroform. We had not the slightest doubt that these things were saturated in the dreaded anaesthetic which, as Thwaites had many times pointed out to us, could put you to sleep for hours at a stretch. "If my father has to saw off somebody's leg," he said, "he pours chloroform on to a pad and the person sniffs it and goes to sleep and my father saws his leg off without him even feeling it."
"But why do they put it into sweets and sell them to us?" we asked him. You might think a question like this would have baffled Thwaites. But Thwaites was never baffled.
"My father says Tonsil Ticklers were invented for dangerous prisoners in jail," he said. "They give them one with each meal and the chloroform makes them sleepy and stops them rioting."
"Yes," we said, "but why sell them to children?"
"It's a plot," Thwaites said. "A grown-up plot to keep us quiet. — Roald Dahl

[T]hey stretch you on a table. Then they bid you close your eyelids, And they mask you with a napkin, And the anaesthetic reaches Hot and subtle through your being. — William Ernest Henley

Bungee Jump is to Suicide as General Anaesthetic is to Lethal Injection. You only know the difference on the way back up. — Matt Greene

Oh better far those echoing hells
Half-threaten'd in the pealing bells
Than that this 'I' should cease to be - — John Betjeman

As a surgical patient, by means of a local anaesthetic, can look on with a clear consciousness while an operation is being performed upon him and yet feel nothing, I could repeat to myself some favourite lines, or watch my grandfather attempting to talk to Swann about the Duc d'Audriffet-Pasquier, without being able to kindle any emotion from one or amusement from the other. — Marcel Proust

When the invasion began, the British public was called upon to 'support' troops sent illegally and undemocratically to kill people with whom we had no quarrel. 'The ultimate test of our professionalism' is how Commander McKendrick describes an unprovoked attack on a nation with no submarines, no navy and no air force, and now with no clean water and no electricity and, in many hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to amputate small limbs shredded by shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how this is done, with a gag in the patient's mouth. — John Pilger

A remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision, especially when there is any degree of phimosis. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering anaesthetic, as the pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed. — John Harvey Kellogg

An anaesthetic is a poet-killer. — Lewis Hyde

When I tell a patient that I think I should do their operation under local anaesthetic they usually look a little shocked. In fact the brain cannot itself feel pain since pain is a phenomenon produced within the brain. — Henry Marsh

The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And — Marcel Proust

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round. — Philip Larkin

The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think - and to feel - such melancholy things. — Marcel Proust

The severance between us was surgical, and there was no anaesthetic.. — Jostein Gaarder

You have the look of someone who'll die under general anaesthetic while having liposuction. — Marian Keyes

A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger. — Vladimir Nabokov

Photography is a tool to negotiate our idea of reality. Thus it is the responsibility of photographers to not contribute with anaesthetic images but rather to provide images that shake consciousness. — Joan Fontcuberta

Acknowledgements!
My thanks to Hollywood
When you showed me John Rambo
Stitching up his arm with no anaesthetic
And giving them "a war they won't believe"
I knew then my calling, the job for me

Thanks also to the recruitment adverts
For showing me soldiers whizzing around on skis
And for sending sergeants to our school
To tell us of the laughs, the great food, the pay
The camaraderie

I am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debt
You paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimage
One year basking in the Garden of Eden
(I haven't quite left yet)

Thanks to Mum and thanks to Dad
Fuck it,
Thanks to every parent
Flushing with pride for their brave young lads
Buying young siblings toy guns and toy tanks
Waiting at the airport
Waving their flags — Danny Martin

Good nutrition and vitamins do not directly cure disease, the body does. You provide the raw materials and the inborn wisdom of your body makes the repairs. Someday healthcare without megavitamin therapy will be seen as we today see childbirth without sanitation or surgery without anaesthetic. — Andrew W. Saul

My mother was a trained nurse, and she'd tell me that patients would fight as they were administered anaesthetic, grappling to get the gas mask off their face. — Maeve Binchy

In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use 'was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling11'. For the next half-century it would be the drug of choice for young people. One learned body, the Askesian Society, was for a time devoted to little else. Theatres put on 'laughing gas evenings'12 where volunteers could refresh themselves with a robust inhalation and then entertain the audience with their comical staggerings. It wasn't until 1846 that anyone got around to finding a practical use for nitrous oxide, as an anaesthetic. Goodness knows how many tens of thousands of people suffered unnecessary agonies under the surgeon's knife because no-one had thought of the gas's most obvious practical application. — Bill Bryson

Marriage is the operation by which a woman's vanity and a man's egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic. — Helen Rowland

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix. — Richard Dawkins

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction. — D.H. Lawrence

Fear is quite the anaesthetic — A. Ashley Straker

Suffering cheerfully endured ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy. The man who flies from suffering is the victim of endless tribulation before it has come to him and is half dead when it does come. But one who is cheerfully ready for anything and everything that comes escapes all pain, his cheerfulness acts as an anaesthetic. — Mahatma Gandhi

Bundy Rum- better than local anaesthetic. — Cheryse Durrant

IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung
for one reason alone
because it works.
A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing
measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era
we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas. — Hakim Bey

Revolution applies a local anaesthetic to one class of society and operates on the other. — Ameen Rihani

We were using ether and oxygen as anaesthetic and she was particularly adept at holding her breath while the mask was on her face then returning suddenly to violent life when we thought she was asleep. We were both sweating when she finally went under. — James Herriot

Ubiquity is the master pacifier, a potent anaesthetic and persuasive desensitiser, and through the universality of His works - where both predator and prey, wicked and good suffer enormously without favouritism or bias in a universe whose laws know no sympathy - the wicked architect has ensured the curious and the distrusting will seek out any alternative explanation for that which they do not wish to recognise , or better still, not see the depravity at all. — John Zande

Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anaesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away. — N.D. Wilson

Bond closed his eyes and mentally explored his body. The worst pain was in his wrists and ankles and in his right hand where the Russian had cut him. In the centre of the body there was no feeling. He assumed that he had been given a local anaesthetic. The rest of his body ached dully as if he had been beaten all over. He could feel the pressure of bandages everywhere and his unshaven neck and chin prickled against the sheets. From the feel of the bristles he knew that he must have been at least three days without shaving. That meant two days since the morning of the torture. — Ian Fleming

We were beginning to understand why, in pre-anaesthetic days, the Bible had stipulated that suicide was a sin. Anything other than the prospect of eternal damnation, and the human race would probably have done away with itself at the first sign of the dentist. — Kate Griffin

Since I learned to read I've used them as a kind of anaesthetic. — Sue Townsend

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways. — Richard Dawkins