A user’s guide to reading the scholarship of anesthesia education

Excerpt

I was recently at a talk given by Thomas Forbes (currently the head of vascular surgery at the University of Western Ontario) in which he related the story of the “Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.”1 As the story goes, nineteenth-century industrial cities depended almost entirely on horses for the daily transport of goods and people within the city limits. As a result, there were literally hundreds of thousands of horses walking the streets of major cities all over the Western world. The problem was that a typical horse produces 15 to 35 pounds of manure per day, which in New York City translated to a daily production of approximately 2.5 million pounds of horse manure,2 all of which had to be removed from the streets for obvious sanitary and esthetic reasons. The need to deal with that much manure on a daily basis was a crisis of monumental proportions. In fact, in 1898 the first international urban planning conference convened in New York, a ten-day event with this issue at its centre. Unfortunately, the conference is reported to have been abandoned after three days because no one could even start to think of a reasonable solution.1 …