ANESTHESIOLOGY

During the past three decades anaesthesia-related mortality has been r educed to an extent which is more or less exclusively governed by huma n error. This improvement has been achieved by nearly equal progresses in drug development as well as in the development of technical device s, especially in monitoring. Nearly 80 % of all anaesthetics which are used today in an anaesthetic university department were developed in the last 30 years. The search and research for better controllable com pounds has caused the necessity to develop also devices which are able to deliver these substances continuously. One might therefore reason that the term pharmaceutical which today is entirely based on the term compound has in the future to be based on a combination of compound a nd device. The pharmacist of today and yesterday may in the future bec ome a high-tech microsystems engineer. From an academic point of view it is unsatisfactory that the degree of therapeutic success can only b e achieved and documented very incompletely. Partially this is due to the fact that the anaesthesiologists are not able to formulate their t herapeutic goals, stating which higher integrative brain functions hav e to be reduced to what degree to guarantee an optimum therapeutic lev el.