THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



execution. There appears to be no donbt whatever that 

 he performed successful minor operations under ether 

 some two or three years before Morton's final demon- 

 stration; hence that the merit of first using the drug, 

 or indeed any drug, in this way belongs to him. But 

 unfortunately Dr. Long did not quite trust the evidence 

 of his own 'experiments. Just at that time the medical 

 journals were full of accounts of experiments in which 

 painless operations were said to be performed through 

 practice of hypnotism, and Dr. Long feared that his own 

 success might be due to an incidental hypnotic influence 

 rather than to the drug. Hence he delayed announcing 

 his apparent discovery until he should have opportunity 

 for further tests and opportunities did not come every 

 day to the county practitioner. And while he waited, 

 Morton anticipated him, and the discovery was made 

 known to the world without his aid. It was a true sci- 

 entific caution that actuated Dr. Long to this delay, but 

 the caution cost him the credit, which might otherwise 

 have been his, of giving to the world one of the greatest 

 blessings that science has ever conferred upon hu- 

 manity. 



A few months after the use of ether became general, 

 the Scotch surgeon Sir J. Y. Simpson discovered that 

 another drug, chloroform, could be administered with 

 similar effects ; that it would, indeed, in many cases pro- 

 duce anesthesia more advantageously even than ether. 

 From that day till this surgeons have been more or less 

 divided in opinion as to the relative merits of the two 

 drugs ; but this fact, of course, has no bearing whatever 

 upon the merit of the first discovery of the method of 

 anesthesia. Even had some other drug subsequently 

 quite banished ether, the honor of the discovery of the 



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