(p. 15) In his new book, “You Bet Your Life,” Paul A. Offit wants to understand the failures and tragedies that help pave the way to medical innovation. For most of human history, anesthesia did not exist. Patients had to be forcibly restrained while their limbs were amputated and their cancers were removed, typically amid piercing screams and unbearable agony. Things did not start to change until the 1840s, when a carnival barker named Gardner Colton charged people 25 cents to sniff “laughing gas,” also known as nitrous oxide, which made them fall down in hysterics and then go to sleep for a few minutes. On Dec. 10, 1844, a dentist named Horace Wells attended Colton’s show. Soon after inhaling the gas (and making a fool of himself), he told a friend that a person could probably “have a tooth extracted or a limb amputated and not feel any pain.”
Wells sought out Colton immediately after the show, and the very next day, he became the first person to use nitrous oxide as an anesthetic: He asked a fellow dentist to extract one of his own teeth. The procedure was painless. Over the following weeks, Wells used nitrous oxide on 15 of his patients. It worked every time. In January 1845, he asked if he could demonstrate his method to specialists in a large amphitheater at the Massachusetts General Hospital. The demonstration failed. Wells gave too little of the anesthetic to his patient, who woke up during the extraction, in intense pain and screaming. Members of the audience shouted out, “Humbug!” Wells was disgraced.
. . .
Offit is a good storyteller, and he has some terrific stories to tell. He also draws important lessons. In the domain of medical innovation, tragedies cannot be prevented, no matter how many regulations we put in place. Science moves forward in fits and starts, with blunders, failures and losses along the way. New discoveries are rarely immediate; we inevitably learn more over time. Ours is not a risk-free world, which means that we need to choose the lesser risk. New technologies are always a gamble.
All of those claims are true, but I think that Offit also pulls out an even deeper and more provocative moral from this history. In life and in public policy, many people in Europe and the United States are drawn to the “precautionary principle,” which essentially calls for a high degree of risk aversion: Whenever an innovation threatens to cause harm, we should be exceedingly cautious before we allow it. Offit’s examples, and the history of medical advances, demonstrate that in its most extreme forms, the precautionary principle is self-defeating. Simply put, precautions kill. Whether we are speaking of anesthesia, heart transplants, antibiotics, chemotherapy or blood transfusions, the precautionary principle would have vastly slowed down innovations that, yes, carried serious risk and led to real harm, but were ultimately a great boon to humanity.
For the full review, see:
Cass R. Sunstein. “Side Effects.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, October 17, 2021): 15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review was updated Oct. 25, 2021, and has the title “A History of Medical Innovation That Doesn’t Ignore the Side Effects.”)
The book under review is:
Offit, Paul A. You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation. New York: Basic Books, 2021.