222 



DISCOVERY 



cu. 



its use in surgical operations. Nearly half a century 

 later Dr. Horace Wells, an American dentist, had one 

 of his upper teeth extracted without any pain after 

 deeply breathing this gas. A later experiment at the 

 Boston Medical School and Hospital was, however, 

 unsuccessful owing to an insufficient quantity of the gas 

 being used, and the failure appears to have discouraged 

 Dr. Wells. His former pupil and partner, Dr. W. T. G. 

 Morton, of Boston, then took up the subject, and was led 

 to the use of sulphuric ether as an anaesthetic. In 

 September, 1846, he extracted a tooth without pain 

 while the patient was breathing sulphuric ether, and in 

 the following month a severe operation was performed 

 painlessly under the gas at the Boston Hospital. 



More than four years earlier, in March, 1842, Dr. C. W. 

 Long, then of Jefferson, Jackson County, U.S.A., had 

 used sulphuric ether as an anaesthetic during minor 

 operations, but he took no steps to make his discovery 

 known, and the new era in anaesthetics and in surgery 

 opened with Dr. Morton's work. Within a few weeks 

 the vapour of sulphuric ether had been used successfully 

 in several other cases of surgical operation in Boston. 

 So soon as the news reached Edinburgh, Simpson was 

 eager to prove the virtue of the new anodyne to relieve 

 the agonising pains of women in travail. He entered the 

 field immediately, and, selecting a difficult case for 

 experiment, proved in January, 1847, that the sufferings 

 of the mother during childbirth could be alleviated by 

 the inhalation of ether- vapour, and that the use of the 

 anaesthetic was not injurious to the child. 



Simpson was not satisfied, however, that sulphuric 

 ether was the best agent for producing anaesthesia. 

 He obtained a number of other volatile liquids, and tested 

 them systematically with the object of finding an anodyne 



