Curarisation Compared With Other Methods of Securing Relaxation in Anesthesia.

Celebrating 75 years of Anaesthesia: our past, present and future. The science of neuromuscular blockade, 75 years on

“…We have selected a team of guest authors, some with an interest in the chosen paper or topic, and some with their own attachment to the history of the journal. This month, we focus on the 1940s, and we have chosen the first original article published in the journal which looked at curarisation as compared with other methods of securing muscle relaxation in anaesthesia [2]. Of course, we no longer refer to such agents as ‘muscle relaxants’, due to our detailed understanding of their mechanism of action at the neuromuscular junction, which is different from muscle relaxants used in musculoskeletal disorders that act on the spinal cord or brain [3].…”