[Anesthesiology].

During the past three decades anaesthesia-related mortality has been reduced to an extent which is more or less exclusively governed by human error. This improvement has been achieved by nearly equal progresses in drug development as well as in the development of technical devices, especially in monitoring. Nearly 80% of all anaesthetics which are used today in an anaesthetic university department were developed in the last 30 years. The search and research for better controllable compounds has caused the necessity to develop also devices which are able to deliver these substances continuously. One might therefore reason that the term pharmaceutical which today is entirely based on the term compound has in the future to be based on a combination of compound and device. The pharmacist of today and yesterday may in the future become a high-tech microsystems engineer. From an academic point of view it is unsatisfactory that the degree of therapeutic success can only be achieved and documented very incompletely. Partially this is due to the fact that the anaesthesiologists are not able to formulate their therapeutic goals, stating which higher integrative brain functions have to be reduced to what degree to guarantee an optimum therapeutic level.