vni CONQUEST OF DISEASE 221 



cannot be recalled. The particular pangs are now forgotten ; 

 but the black whirlwind of emotion, the horror of great darkness, 

 and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close upon 

 despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my 

 heart, I can never forget, however gladly I would do so." 



Now, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes : " The 

 fierce extremity of suffering has been steeped in the 

 waters of forgetfulness, and the deepest furrow in the 

 knotted brow of agony has been smoothed for ever." 



The bust of Sir James Young Simpson in Westminster 

 Abbey bears the inscription : " To whose Genius and 

 Benevolence the world owes the Blessings derived from 

 the Use of Chloroform for the Relief of Suffering." When 

 a young medical student, Simpson was so greatly 

 distressed by the groans of a woman under an operation 

 that he thought of relinquishing his career for work in 

 which he would not meet so much suffering. After 

 reflection, however, he decided to continue his studies 

 with the problem ever on his heart and mind how the 

 pains to which humanity is subject could be relieved. 

 When lecturing to his students in later years, he never 

 wearied in insisting that " the proud mission of the 

 physician is distinctly twofold viz., to alleviate human 

 suffering as well as to preserve human life." It was this 

 noble motive which made him eager to adopt any method 

 of surgical anaesthesia and to carry on systematic 

 experiments and inquiries with the object of finding an 

 aid to painless surgery. 



Before Simpson proved the power of chloroform to 

 put man into a deep sleep, several anaesthetics had been 

 used ^pr this purpose. While working at the Pneumatic 

 Institution in Bristol near the end of the eighteenth 

 century, Sir Humphry Davy discovered the intoxicating 

 and stupefying action of nitrous oxide, and suggested 



