NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



tions painless must be utterly abandoned that the 

 surgeon's knife must ever remain a synonym for slow 

 and indescribable torture. By an odd coincidence it 

 chanced that Sir Benjamin Brodie, the acknowledged 

 leader of English surgeons, had publicly expressed this 

 as his deliberate though regretted opinion at a time 

 when the quest which he considered futile had already 

 led to the most brilliant success in America, and while 

 the announcement of the discovery, which then had no 

 transatlantic cable to convey it, was actually on its way 

 to the Old World. 



The American dentist just referred to, who was, with 

 one exception to be noted presently, the first man in 

 the world to conceive that the administration of a defi- 

 nite drug might render a surgical operation painless and 

 to give the belief application was Dr. Horace Wells, of 

 Hartford, Connecticut. The drug with which he ex- 

 perimented was nitrous oxide the same that Davy 

 had used ; the operation that he rendered painless was 

 no more important than the extraction of a tooth 

 yet it sufficed to mark a principle ; the year of the ex- 

 periment was 1844. 



The experiments of Dr. Wells, however, though im- 

 portant, were not sufficiently demonstrative to bring 

 the matter prominently to the attention of the medical 

 world. The drug with which he experimented proved 

 not always reliable, and he himself seems ultimately to 

 have given the matter up, or at least to have relaxed his 

 efforts. But meantime a friend, to whom he had com- 

 municated his belief and expectations, took the matter 

 up, and with unremitting zeal carried forward experi- 

 ments that were destined to lead to more tangible re- 



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