Anaesthetic experiences in 1,300 major geriatric operations.

Since 1955 at least forty articles on geriatric anaesthesia and associated problems have appeared in the literature. Fifteen of these have been written in English and the others in European languages, mostly German and Italian. Fourteen of the fifteen English articles have originated from North America. To the best of the writer's knowledge this leaves Bedford's (1955) contribution as one of the last important articles on this subject appearing in a British journal. That alone would seem sufficient reason to present this series. The fact that the work is a combination of Continental surgery and British anaesthetic methods may add to its interest. Before describing the series in detail, a brief survey of the American contribution is given. These articles generally give authors' opinions on geriatric anaesthesia but do not usually support them with the results of series. However, Corssen (1955) describes a large series of 5,450 patients aged 60 years or more who were operated on during a twelve-year period. Seventy per cent of the operations were in the fields of general and genito-urinary surgery. In certain respects there are considerable differences between Corssen's series and that of the present author. The average duration of the operations was 88 minutes and 7.7 per cent of these lasted more than 3 hours. Also his series included minor surgery. Further, the anaesthetic techniques used included cyclo-