THERAPEUTIC nerve block.

"Therapeutic nerve block" is but one of the many ramifications of regional analgesia. The history of the introduction and development of perineural injections of analgesic and neurolytic agents for therapy coincides with that of similar types of injections to control the pain associated with surgical procedures. The use of surgical analgesic nerve blocks has eclipsed by far similar procedures employed to cure or alleviate pain or symptoms resulting from disease or injury. Coming into being, as it did, less than fifty-seven years ago, regional analgesia found a large number of enthusiastic surgical pioneers to explore its possibilities, exploit its application and evaluate it in surgical practice. Nerve block was discovered at the very dawn of modern abdominal surgery when the leaders in medicine were focusing the attention of the world on the blessings of the scalpel and were giving their best efforts toward developing the possibilities that anesthesia and antisepsis