THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



test his discovery decisively on one of the patients at 

 the Boston Hospital during a severe operation. The re- 

 quest was granted ; the test was made on October 16, 1846, 

 in the presence of several of the foremost surgeons of 

 the city and of a body of medical students. The pa- 

 tient slept quietly while the surgeon's knife was plied, 

 and awoke to astonished comprehension that the ordeal 

 was over. The impossible, the miraculous, had been ac- 

 complished. 



Swiftly as steam could carry it slowty enough we 

 should think it to-da} r the news was heralded to all the 

 world. It was received in Europe with incredulity, 

 which vanished before repeated experiments. Surgeons 

 were loath to believe that ether, a drug that had long 

 held a place in the subordinate armamentarium of the 

 physician, could accomplish such a miracle. But scepti- 

 cism vanished before the tests which any surgeon might 

 make, and which surgeons all over the world did make 

 within the next few weeks. Then there came a linger- 

 ing 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 Wendell 

 Holmes had christened the new method was a proced- 

 ure 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 antediluvians 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 man- 

 kind to suffer needless agony. And so within a few 



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