Gaston Labat's Regional Anesthesia: the missing years

Abstract

Gaston Labat's textbook Regional Anesthesia: Its Technique and Clinical Application was one of the earliest regional anesthesia texts, and certainly one of the most successful. Although Dr. Labat was working on a third edition at the time of his death, its fate and the reason for a more than 30-year delay in publishing a third edition have often been speculated upon. A search of the John S. Lundy Archive revealed communications between Dr. Lundy and Labat's widow which help explain the delay. Further searches into the collections of John Adriani, MD, help explain how he came to be the one to publish the long-awaited third edition.