THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



other discovery that had come in the century, perhaps 

 in any field of science whatever. This was the discov- 

 ery of the pain-dispelling power of the vapor of sul- 

 phuric ether, inhaled by a patient undergoing a surgical 

 operation. This discovery come solely out of America, 

 and it stands curiously isolated, since apparently no 

 minds in any other country were trending towards it 

 even vaguely. Davy, in England, had indeed originated 

 the method of medication by inhalation, and carried out 

 some most interesting experiments fifty years earlier, 

 and it was doubtless his experiments with nitrous oxide 

 gas that gave the clew to one of the American investi- 

 gators ; but this was the sole contribution of preceding 

 generations to the subject, and since the beginning of 

 the century, when Davy turned his attention to other 

 matters, no one had made the slightest advance along 

 the same line until an American dentist renewed the 

 investigation. Moreover, there had been nothing- in 

 Davy's experiments to show that a surgical operation 

 might be rendered painless in this way ; and, indeed, 

 the surgeons of Europe had acknowledged with one ac- 

 cord that all hope of finding a means to secure this 

 most desirable end 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. 



