What Is Minimal Monitoring?

Abstract

During the first half century of anesthesia administration, the standards of monitoring were never discussed. The status of the patient was described in terms of the patient’s breathing (free or stertorous, slow or fast), color of skin (dry and warm or cold and clammy), and mucus membranes (pale or engorged, pink or cyanotic) and pulse (rapid or slow, full or thready). Then anesthetists began to count and record heart rate and frequency of breathing and to measure and plot the arterial pressure. Many years passed before the electrocardiogram was added to these variables. It was not until much later, well after World War II, that monitoring became so well accepted and universally adopted that one could speak of a standard of monitoring represented by community practice.