What is the ether screen?

ether open drop method

If you needed an operation a couple of decades ago, you’d be put to sleep by smelling ether, the same stuff for frogs and dogs. Your anesthetist puts a strainer on your face (also known as a Yankauer mask), covers it with gauze, and drops ether one after the other until you fall asleep. The heat and humidity from your breathing helps to vaporize the liquid anesthetic. Obviously too much is bad, while too little means you’re still awake. Theoretically, as you go deeper, your breathing slows, decreasing ether intake. 

Michael Caine holding the Yankauer mask for the ether open drop

in the movie Cider House Rules

Now obviously, after some time, the ether gets concentrated around the patient’s head, and affects everyone in the vicinity. Your eyes well up, you get sleepy, and movement is affected. Surgeons most critically. For this reason, the anesthetist drapes a blanket over the patient’s chest, like a wall, slung like you would a clothesline spanning the patient’s width. This drape is sprayed with water, minimizing the passing of the gaseous ether towards the patient’s thorax. This blanket-wall acts as an ether screen, preventing noxious gases from reaching the surgeons. One of the many ways anesthetists protect the surgeons and thereby, helping you, the patient.

Today, ether for humans have been effectively decommissioned, and years of research ushered in modern anesthesia, but the ether screen remains, though its importance is no less critical. It now maintains the operative site sterile, and demarcates the working environment for the surgeons.

This blog will invariably attempt to inject some tidbits about that area up north, cephalad from the “blood brain barrier.” Its about musings, thoughts and ideas from behind the ether screen.