| In his review of ‘Transmission and block in autonomic ganglia' at the 1953 Philadelphia meeting (Pharmacol. Rev., 6, 59–67), W.D.M. Paton wrote the following description of ‘hexamethonium man' as a description of the results of blocking autonomic ganglia: |
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He is a pink complexioned person, except when he has stood for a long time, when he may get pale and faint. His handshake is warm and dry. He is a placid and relaxed companion; for instance, he may laugh, but he cannot cry because the tears cannot come. Your rudest story will not make him blush, and the most unpleasant circumstances will fail to make him turn pale. His collars and socks stay very clean and sweet. He wears corsets and may, if you meet him out, be rather fidgety (corsets to compress his splanchnic vascular pool, fidgety to keep the venous return going from the legs). He dislikes speaking much unless helped with something to moisten his dry mouth and throat. He is long-sighted and easily blinded by bright light. The redness of his eye-balls may suggest irregular habits and in fact his head is rather weak. But he always behaves like a gentleman and never belches or hiccups. He tends to get cold and keeps well wrapped up. But his health is good; he does not have chilblains and those diseases of modern civilization, hypertension and peptic ulcer, pass him by. He is thin because his appetite is modest; he never feels hunger pain and his stomach never rumbles. He gets rather constipated so that his intake of liquid paraffin is high. As old age comes on he will suffer from retention of urine and impotence, but frequency, precipitancy, and strangury will not worry him. One is uncertain how he will end, but perhaps if he is not careful, by eating less and less and getting colder and colder, he will sink into a symptomless, hypoglycaemic coma and die, as was proposed for the universe, a sort of entropy death. |
| Inspired by this, in his summary of the meeting (Pharmac. Rev., 6, 123) R.W. Gerard came up with the following version in verse: |
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When C-6 is about in excess, |
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A man's organs yield under stress. |
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In a corset they're tucked, |
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His gut can't eruct, |
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And he faces an entropic death. |
