562 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



developing along lines which ensured accelerated progress under the 

 impetus of the discoveries in bacteriology which were soon to follow, 

 and we could with propriety pass on to the era of bacteriology, if it were 

 not for one great boon, destined to have an enormous influence on the 

 practise of surgery, on the diminution of human suffering and on the 

 general advance of research in medicine. This was the introduction of 

 anesthesia. Surgery had steadily advanced in technic, resourcefulness 

 and daring, but the torments of surgery were such that operations were 

 mainly those of necessity. As Mumford says : 



Surgical pain was real enough; there was no disguising it. The terror of 

 operation was a very hell, even in anticipation; the fact itself no man has found 

 words to describe. The shadow of it has lengthened even to our own day. 

 Surgeons as well as patients dreaded the knife. 



Eobert Liston, two years before the discovery of ether congratulated 

 his students that the " field of operative surgery " was " happily nar- 

 rowed." Keen writes : 



It is a striking commentary on the immediate results of anesthesia to learn 

 that, in the five years before the introduction of ether, only 184 persons were 

 willing to submit themselves to such a dreadful ordeal in the Massachusetts 

 Hospital, an average of 37 operations per annum, or 3 per month. In the five 

 years immediately succeeding its introduction, although the old horror could not 

 be overcome, 487 operations, or almost 100 annually, were performed in the same 

 hospital. During the last year (1898) in the same hospital 3,700 operations 

 were performed. 



This change was brought about in 1846, when "W. T. G. Morton, an 

 American dentist, by publicly administering ether, proved to the world 

 that it was a safe and sure anesthetic. The operation was performed 

 by John Collins Warren at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the 

 names anesthesia and anesthetic were suggested by Oliver Wendell 

 Holmes. Anesthesia was therefore essentially a Boston affair as far 

 as its introduction to the world was concerned, but the claims of its 

 discovery made by others (Long, Jackson, Wells, Marcy) leave the 

 question of priority in the knowledge of and use of ether in much con- 

 fusion. With this phase we are not at present concerned. One year 

 after the demonstration in Boston, Simpson, of Edinburgh, recom- 

 mended chloroform as an anesthetic of equal value with ether. Not 

 only surgery but obstetrics, dentistry and the various specialties bene- 

 fited by this great boon of anesthesia and within a year the administra- 

 tion of anesthetics was a universal practise throughout the civilized 

 world. Surgery, freed of its horrors, developed along lines hitherto 

 undreamed of, and made those rapid strides which prepared it for the 

 era of antisepsis in the next generation. 



The next lecture will concern itself with the story of Pasteur and 

 the development of bacteriology and the influence of the latter on 

 medicine and surgery. 



