Epicaine

After five years' effort to synthesize a harmless, efficient local anesthetic, a Columbia University Research physiologist, Dr. Raymond Lester Osborne, in Science last week reported success. Ever since Dr. Carl Roller, an Austrian who now practises ophthalmology in Manhattan, discovered in 1884 that cocaine deadens sensation long enough for a minor operation, doctors worried because i) cocaine may start a bad narcotic habit, 2) cause a dangerous shock to the system. Best substitute has been procaine (usually called novocain), synthesized in 1905 by a German. But procaine causes capillaries to expand. Thus, 1) an incision may bleed dangerously, or 2) the drug quickly diffuses into the blood stream and loses its local anesthetic effect. To overcome the bad features of cocaine and procaine, anesthetists use them in conjunction with epinephrine (also called adrenalin) which makes capillaries contract and holds the anesthetic at the spot where it is needed. But epinephrine throws some people into twitters. It may not be used intravenously or intraspinally.

Epicaine is the name which Dr. Osborne gave the new composition which does all that cocaine or procaine together with epinephrine does. Chemically epicaine is alpha (3, 4-dihydroxyphenyl) beta (paraaminobenzoylbetadiethylaminoethanol) al-phaethanonehydrochloride. Dr. Osborne proved this strange substance's efficacy on the "frog's sciatic plexus . . . the cat's blood pressure, the uteri of the guinea pig and cat, the gut of the cat, rabbit and monkey, the excised frog's eye and the Pupil in the intact cat."

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