1868.] Tis Recent Progress and Present Condition. 43 
would be rendered diaphanous, and morbid changes be detected in 
its innermost recesses. 
But our space will not permit us to linger in this tempting 
field, and we pass on to notice a very few of the latest improvements 
in the Art of Medicine. If asked to indicate the one quality which 
characterizes the present race of practitioners as compared with the 
majority of their predecessors, we should say that it is conscientious- 
ness, shown by increased reverence for the human body, and a 
greater wish to diminish pain or to avoid its infliction. Surgery 
has become eminently conservative. The man is not now most 
admired by his brethren who performs in the most dashing style 
the capital operations of surgery. It is almost universally felt that 
such operations, being more or less serious mutilations, are, in the 
same ratio, confessions of the imperfection of the art. He is not 
now liable to be sneered at, as he was within our recollection, who 
professes greater pride in the preservation of a finger than in the 
amputation of an entire limb. Modern surgery thinks it no conde- 
scension to labour in the removal, not of disabling deformities only, 
but of disfigurements and blemishes, and by various plastic opera- 
tions to endeayour to restore to “the human form divine” its 
pristine beauty, lost by accident or disease. Many of these triumphs 
of conservative surgery would, because of their tedious and therefore 
additionally painful nature, have been impracticable but for the 
grandest discovery ever made in relation to the art of medicine, 
that, viz. of a safe and easy method of producing temporary uncon- 
sciousness of pain. If there be one invention of human genius 
worthy to be called an anticipation of the millennium, it is that of 
anesthetics. To say nothing of the preservation of hfe, the amount 
of agony from which mankind has thus been saved is incalculable. 
This topic, the avoidance of suffering in surgical operations, is 
one of such surpassing interest to humanity that we are tempted to 
enlarge upon it a little. Nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed 
since the introduction into practice of the use of anesthetics, and 
of the present generation few are conscious, from their own ex- 
perience or observation, of the magnitude of the boon; and this 
may be said even of the large majority of surgeons now in practice. 
We will, therefore, extract from a work not likely to be read 
except by professional persons, and written by one who has done 
more than any other man living to bring about this blessed change, 
Sir James Simpson, a description by a master in the art of com- 
position, the late Professor George Wilson, of Edinburgh, of the 
horrors of a surgical operation under the old mode of treatment. 
“Several years ago,” Professor Wilson writes in a letter to Sir 
James Simpson, “I was required to prepare, on very short warning, 
for the loss of a limb by amputation . . . I at once agreed 
to submit to the operation, but asked a week to prepare for it; 
