INTRODUCTION
Spinal anesthesia is perhaps one of the oldest and most studied modalities for providing pain relief in patients undergoing surgery. J. Leonard Corning(1) is credited with administering the first spinal anesthetic in 1885, and his experience was subsequently published in a medical journal. Although the use of intrathecal anesthesia administration in children was described in the early twentieth century,(2,3) this technique was seldom used in the pediatric population until Melman(4) reported a series of high-risk infants who underwent successful surgery under spinal anesthesia. Reports of apnea following general anesthesia in preterm infants appeared in the literature in the early 1980s,(5–9) and a series from Abajian et al.(10) offered practitioners an impetus to offer an alternative technique with reportedly fewer complications than general anesthesia. A number of series have since been reported in all age groups for a variety of surgical procedures attesting to the safety and efficacy of spinal anesthesia.(11–13)