Corning, Cocaine, and Local Anesthesia

To the Editor.  —Dr Goldberg's centennial melodrama¹ captures the historical events surrounding the discovery of cocaine as a local anesthetic in an informative, provocative and historically rich manner. We wish to add an additional player, James Leonard Corning, to the already renowned list of dramatis personae.Born in 1855 in Stamford, Conn, Corning studied at German universities in Heidelberg and Würzburg. Later, he became a prolific writer with an avid interest in neurology and was a frequent observer at the Roosevelt Hospital where Halsted performed his teaching.²³In 1885, one year after Carl Koller demonstrated the usefulness of cocaine as a surface analgesic, Corning⁴ designed a series of experiments to test this new agent on the spinal cord. He proposed that injections of cocaine into minute interspinal blood vessels located between the spinous processes would be rapidly transported to the spinal cord and affect a temporary transverse myelitis.