Empirical procedures firmly entrenched in the habits of good doctors seem to have a vigor and life, not to say immortality of their own. It is difficult to alter them. The whole field of analgesics, especially the narcotics, offers many ready examples of this, and of these, preanesthetic medication will be considered here. Anyone who has watched the hair-raising struggles of a poorly guided novice with an ether cone can understand how the early anesthetists must have welcomed any help they could get to subdue their struggling, retching, half-asphyxiated patients. There can be little doubt that in those early and troubled times the suggestion in 1850 of Lorenzo Bruno1of Turin that morphine be used in preanesthetic medication seemed helpful. A couple of decades later the great Claude Bernard2gave the practice his approval, and it has lasted down to the present. It is possible, in the light