CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE 



beneficent method of anaesthesia would have been in no 

 wise invalidated. And despite all cavillings, it is un- 

 equivocally established that the man who gave that 

 method to the world was William T. G. Morton. 



IV 



This discovery of the anaesthetic power of drugs was 

 destined presently, in addition to its direct beneficences, 

 to aid greatly in the progress of scientific medicine, by 

 facilitating those experimental studies of animals from 

 which, before the day of anaesthesia, many humane 

 physicians were withheld, and which in recent years have 

 led to discoveries of such inestimable value to humanity. 

 But for the moment this possibility was quite overshad- 

 owed by the direct benefits of anaesthesia, and the long 

 strides that were taken in scientific medicine during the 

 first fifteen years after Morton's discovery were mainly 

 independent of such aid. These steps were taken, in- 

 deed, in a field that at first glance might seem to have 

 a very slight connection with medicine. Moreover, the 

 chief worker in the field was not himself a physician. 

 He was a chemist, and the work in which he was now 

 engaged was the study of alcoholic fermentation in vi- 

 nous liquors. Yet these studies paved the way for the 

 most important advances that medicine has made in any 

 century towards the plane of true science ; and to this 

 man more than to any other single individual it might 

 almost be said more than to all other individuals was 

 due this wonderful advance. It is almost superfluous to 

 add that the name of this marvellous chemist was Louis 

 Pasteur. 



The studies of fermentation which Pasteur entered 



375 



