1868. | Its Recent Progress and Present Condition. 45 
haunted me, and even now they are easily resuscitated; and though 
they cannot bring back the suffermg attending the events which 
gave them a place in my memory, they can occasion a suffering of 
their own, and be the cause of a disquiet which favours neither 
mental nor bodily health. From memories of this kind those sub- 
jects of operations who receive chloroform are of course free; and 
could I even now, by some Lethean draught, erase the remem- 
brances I speak of, I would drink it; for they are easily brought 
back, and are never welcome.” 
“ After perusing,” continues Sir James Simpson, “such a touch- 
ing and terrible account of what surgical patients were sometimes 
called upon to suffer, before the introduction of modern anesthetics, 
it is delightful to reflect that all these forms of human agony are 
essentially ended and abrogated. We now know also and acknow- 
ledge that these tortures, so long endured as dire necessities, were 
of no advantage, but the very reverse, to the patient himself... . 
While anesthetics save the patient from the agonies produced by 
the cutting of his living flesh, they at the same time preserve his 
strength and enhance his chances of recovery. But they are not 
a boon merely to the patient: they are a blessing also to the 
surgeon himself, as they enable him to accomplish his knife-work 
far more calmly and deliberately.”* 
There is one use of anesthesia in which, although it applies 
only to one sex, we must all rejoice. The pain, often amounting 
to agony, which, in obeying the first command, “increase and 
multiply,” hy a mysterious arrangement of Providence, woman 
alone endures, may, by the use of chloroform or similar agents 
be, with perfect safety to mother and child, rendered comparatively 
insignificant. And by the avoidance of the nervous exhaustion 
caused by long-continued suffering, life is often saved which, under 
different circumstances, would have been sacrificed. 
Great, however, as have been the blessings conferred by general 
anesthetics, their use has. its drawbacks. A few persons have 
succumbed to their depressing effects on the vital energies. The 
discovery, therefore, of some means which, without producing 
general unconsciousness, would render the part to be operated 
upon insensible, had become a desideratum. ‘The want has been 
supplied in more than one way. The local application, as propcs-d 
by Dr. Arnott, of ice or of freezing mixtures, by which the part 
was temporarily frozen, was a great advance; but the perfection of 
local insensibility seems to be attained by Dr. Richardson’s beautiful 
invention of ether-spray. 
* Anzsthetics do more for the surgeon even than this: they save him from 
possible physical suffering. The writer of this article, when many years since a 
dresser at a London hospital, had one of his fiugers severely bitten by a poor little 
boy, who was undergoing a painful operation, : 
