In 1977, Dr Kerr published an unusual case series in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. As a specialist in the area of anaesthesia for middle ear surgery, he had been using the technique of the day, inducing deliberate hypotension with a mixture of volatile and ganglion-blocking agents. Prompted by a desire to present his surgical colleague with as bloodless a field as possible, he decided to probe the physiological limits of the technique, essentially by investigating how low he could go [1].
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