James T. Gwathmey and the Mysterious J. Langsdorff & Co. Machine
Anesthesiology · 2024
Judith Robins, retired Wood Library-Museum (WLM) staff member and Wood Fellowship recipient, recently linked an orphaned machine made by J. Langsdorff & Co. (center) to the great James Tayloe Gwathmey, M.D. (1862 to 1944, left). In the early 20th century, Gwathmey, a New York City–based anesthetist, led efforts to modernize the specialty through professional organizations and innovative technology. Ms. Robins surmised that the WLM’s Langsdorff apparatus had to be either a prototype or a copycat of the well-known Gwathmey-Woolsey N2O-O2 Apparatus manufactured by Foregger. Introduced in 1912, and featured alongside Gwathmey in his famous textbook, Anesthesia (left), the Langsdorff version of the Gwathmey-Woolsey represented a significant advance in anesthetic administration—an evolution from inhalers to compressed gas–driven apparatus independent of patient respiratory effort. The Langsdorff was not the first to use compressed gas technology, but it was internationally influential. After some sleuthing, Ms. Robins found that the WLM’s Langsdorff was in fact the prototype for the better-known 1915 model, made by the Foregger Company (right). Curiously, the WLM’s Langsdorff Apparatus is not an exact match to the inventors’ 1912 description, but, perhaps, a work in progress. In its current state, the heat source has been moved and the divided sight-feed has been replaced with a glass vial and filling port, hinting at Foregger’s imminent change—an ether vaporizer. Rarely are we treated to a glimpse of the innovation process, although we often uncover more questions than we answer. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)Judith A. Robins, M.A., M.A., Wood Library-Museum Fellow, and Melissa L. Coleman, M.D., Associate Professor, Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania.