Join Mensa Winelands for a private tour of the Nagin Parbhoo History of Anaesthesia Museum, which is housed in the University of Cape Town’s Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine at Groote Schuur, on Saturday 26 October at 14h30.
The collection holds the finest collection of early anaesthetic apparatus in Africa, dating back to 1847 – only one year after the historic first public demonstration by Morton in Boston of the efficacy of ether in providing painless surgery. The artefacts trace the development of anaesthesia from an art in the early 1900s to a science in the post WW2 era. These include a variety of early masks and equipment for delivering ether or chloroform, the first Boyles anaesthetic machine designed during WW1, and devices for delivering highly explosive cyclopropane in the 1930s. Ventilators on display range from the hand-size Minivent designed by a Johannesburg anaesthetist in 1965 to the 620kg Draeger iron lung that was used in the polio epidemics in the 1950s.
The outing will be preceded by a short presentation on the history of anaesthesia by Emeritus Associate Professor Peter Gordon, who is the Honorary Curator of this museum.
As numbers for this tour are strictly limited, early booking is advised. Please respond by email to the Winelands secretary.
