NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



lingering outcry from a few surgeons, notably some of 

 the Parisians, that the shock of pain was beneficial to 

 the patient, hence that anaesthesia as Dr. Oliver Wen- 

 dell Holmes had christened the new method was a 

 procedure not to be advised. Then, too, there came a 

 hue-and-cry from many a pulpit that pain was God- 

 given, and hence, on moral grounds, to be clung to 

 rather than renounced. But the outcry of the ante- 

 diluvians of both hospital and pulpit quickly received 

 its quietus ; for soon it was clear that the patient who 

 did not suffer the shock of pain during an operation 

 rallied better than the one who did so suffer, while all 

 humanity outside the pulpit cried shame to the spirit 

 that would doom mankind to suffer needless agony. 

 And so within a few months after that initial operation 

 at the Boston Hospital in 1846, ether had made good 

 its conquest of pain throughout the civilized world. 

 Only by the most active use of the imagination can we 

 of this present day realize the full meaning of that 

 victory. 



It remains to be added that in the subsequent bick- 

 erings over the discovery such bickerings as follow 

 every great advance two other names came into 

 prominent notice as sharers in the glory of the new 

 method. Both these were Americans the one, Dr. 

 Charles T. Jackson, of Boston ; the other, Dr. Crawford 

 W. Long, of Alabama. As to Dr. Jackson, it is suffi- 

 cient to say that he seems to have had some vague ink- 

 ling of the peculiar properties of ether before Morton's 

 discovery. He even suggested the use of this drug to 

 Morton, not knowing that Morton had already tried it; 

 but this is the full measure of his association with the 



VOL. nr. 15 21$ 



