426 BAYARD HOLMES 



cruel stolidity to a culture of greater refinement, the barbarous 

 methods of treating fractures and dislocations were rapidly 

 advanced and modified until the system of Hamilton, based 

 partly upon theoretical grounds and partly upon anatomical 

 study, assumed its scientific position. The study of the geo- 

 graphical and contemporaneous appearance of inventions 

 could be beautifully illustrated by the discovery of general 

 anesthesia, by the achievements in gynecological surgery, and 

 by the methods, devices and achievements of intestinal sur- 

 gery, and by the practice of appendicectomy. 



The three epoch making achievements in surgery are 

 hemostasis, anesthesia and antisepsis, — the arrest of hemor- 

 rhage, the abolition of pain, and the prevention of infection. Of 

 these three great achievements America can indisputably 

 claim but one, and upon this one all the possibilities of surgery 

 indubitably depend. It is almost inconceivable that it took 

 more than a quarter of a century for the ligature of Pere to dis- 

 place the cautery of the ancients, and remove from the oper- 

 ating room the tragic forge and the actual cautery. The use- 

 fulness of the silken hemostatic was still limited by the agony 

 of the cut. Surgery had been robbed of one of its greatest 

 dangers, hemorrhage, but the knife and pain were still insepa- 

 rable. Only when cosmetic dentistry and the higher standards 

 of modern American hfe made surgery a common inheritance, 

 were the materials of anesthesia, which Davey (1799) and 

 Faraday (1818) had discovered almost half a century before, 

 brought to their highest use. 



Horace Wells was a practitioner of dentistry in Hartford, 

 Connecticut. On the 10th of December, 1844, he saw an 

 exhibition in which Dr. G. Hugh Colton used laughing gas, or 

 nitrous oxide gas, upon a certain Mr. Cooley, who during the 

 performance sustained a severe injury of the leg, the evident 

 and necessary pain of which he never recognized. The next 

 day Dr. Wells inhaled the gas and had a large molar tooth 

 pulled and suffered no pain from it. He used the gas repeat- 

 edly in extracting teeth. Early in 1845 he attempted to 

 demonstrate this anesthetic before a class at Harvard medical 

 school, but either through the idiosyncrasy of the patient or 

 the embarassment of the surroundings and inadequate admin- 



