“I would have everie man write what he knowes and no more.”–Montaigne BRITISH JOURNAL OF ANAESTHESIA

Just a little oxygen to breathe as you go off to sleep...is it always a good idea? Administration of oxygen 100 % to patients before indu-cing anaesthesia provides a reserve of oxygen, mostly in the patient’s functional residual capacity (FRC), to extend the time before hypoxia occurs, should there be difficul-ties achieving adequate ventilation after induction. Preoxygenation is now widely used, and in the operating theatres in which I work, the practice has extended beyond the anaesthetists to nursing staff and operating department practitioners, who now automatically apply a face mask to the patient while I administer the induction agents. An editorial in 2004 argued that routine preoxygenation ‘could be recommended to the profession regardless of the experience, expertise or grade of the practitioner, and man-dated for trainees’.1 The author of this recommendation