Muscle relaxation, together with sleep and analgesia is fundamental to modern anaesthesia. Curare had been known since the first explorations of South America and was studied scientifically from the end of the 18th century. It was used in medicine after 1850, but it was not until a century later that d–tubocurarine, the purified form was used in general anaesthesia. Claude Bernard established curare as a muscle relaxant and Alfred Vulpian localised its action to the neuromuscular junction.
The used of curare medically was rare until 1942 because the preparation was not purified which made accurate dosage difficult. It was however used in the treatment of tetanus. In 1942, the Canadian H.R. Griffith, at the request of the Squibb pharmaceutical company used Intocostrine during general anaesthesia and published the results of 25 cases. News of this spread rapidly to England and America and soon curare would become one of the indispensable elements of anaesthesia. The muscle paralysis it produced necessitated the use of artificial ventilation.
In this display, we see several plants from which curare was extracted : gourd, pot and tube curare and even the so–called curare used by Claude Bernard .
Modern forms of non–depolarizing muscle relaxants are synthetic. (translators note: the word ‘curare’ in French is used generally to translate any muscle relaxant, both depolarizing and non- depolarizing).
Muscle relaxants used at the present time are essentially synthetic. They require monitoring to measure the degree of paralysis during operation and also during recovery to ensure that their action is terminated.