Edmond Eger — set standards, principles for using anesthetics
Private memorial services are being planned for Dr. Edmond “Ted” Eger, a longtime UCSF anesthesiologist and pioneer in the field of inhaled anesthetics.
Dr. Eger, who had pancreatic cancer, died Aug. 26 at his Tiburon home at age 86.
In the 1960s, Dr. Eger helped establish what is now regarded as a universal standard for dosing inhaled anesthetics, called MAC — minimum alveolar concentration — which is used in the administration of anesthesia in surgery rooms around the world.
MAC is a unit of measurement for the potency for all inhaled anesthetics including nitrous oxide, sevofluorane and desflurane, the most commonly used anesthetic gases in modern medicine. It is the concentration at which 50 percent of patients do not respond to pain stimuli like a surgical incision. Before this standard was established, doctors had to estimate how much anesthesia to give a patient by watching for signs like breathing patterns.
Dr. Eger also developed the mathematical principles that guide the transfer of the anesthetic from the anesthesia machine to the patient’s brain, blood and lungs, and then from the brain and blood to the lungs so it could be exhaled, said Dr. Steve Shafer, a friend and the editor of Dr. Eger’s upcoming autobiography and who is a professor of anesthesiology at Stanford University.
“Anesthesiologists apply those principles every day when they put (patients) to sleep,” Shafer said. “He created a framework by which we now understand the behavior of all inhaled anesthetics.”
Two incidents shaped Dr. Eger’s lifelong drive to better understand anesthesia and make it safer, said his wife, Dr. Lynn Spitler. When he was 6, he was anesthetized with ether, an experience he later described as “terrifying, like being drawn into a horrid vortex,” Spitler said. Years later, as a medical student, he was tasked with monitoring a patient by manually controlling his anesthesia breathing bag.
“It was such an overwhelming experience to him,” Dr. Spitler said. “This was one place in medicine where the patient’s life and death really is in your hands.”
Dr. Eger, described by friends and family as warm, gracious and curious, was an avid backpacker and lover of poetry, with a fondness for the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. He read poetry every night before bed, and composed a poem for his wedding day to Dr. Spitler, his wife of 21 years. For his 75th birthday, Dr. Eger and his family hiked to the top of Yosemite’s Half Dome.
Edmond I. Eger II was born in Chicago on Sept. 3, 1930. His father was an advertising executive and his mother was a homemaker. He graduated from Northwestern School of Medicine in 1955.
Dr. Eger is survived by his wife, who lives in Tiburon; daughters Cris Cadence Waste of Juneau, Alaska, Dr. Renee Eger of Sharon, Mass., Dr. Doreen Eger of Kensington; son, Edmond Eger III of Portola Valley; stepdaughter Dr. Diane Anderson of Danville; stepson Paul Spitler of Bozeman, Mont.; seven grandchildren; six stepgrandchildren; and half-brother, Larry Eger of Sarasota, Fla.
The family asks that donations in Dr. Eger’s memory be made to Planned Parenthood or the Wilderness Society.