title: Envisioning cyclopropane: scientific product or medical technology?
abstract: In the late 1920s, V.E. Henderson and his team at the University of Toronto discovered the anaesthetic properties of cyclopropane. For a number of reasons, Henderson did not envision cyclopropane as a useful technology: to him it was simply a gas that possessed anaesthetic properties, rather than a potential clinical product, and this explains why cyclopropane was not first introduced into Toronto hospitals. In contrast, the practicing anaesthesiologist Ralph M. Waters envisioned cyclopropane as a medical technology, partly because it could assist his effort to professionalize anaesthesiology in the 1930s. This paper argues that it is useful to make a historically-informed distinction between cyclopropane the experimental laboratory gas and cyclopropane the medical anaesthetic because such a distinction highlights the social dimensions of the process of scientific discovery and helps illuminate the relationship between scientific production and medical technology.
authors.affiliation: University of Toronto.
authors.forename: Delia
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gavrus
mesh_terms: D000758:Anesthesia / Q000266:history; D000777:Anesthetics / Q000266:history*; D002170:Canada; D003521:Cyclopropanes / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D014481:United States
chemical_list: D000777:Anesthetics; D003521:Cyclopropanes