NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



pated him, and the discovery was made known to the 

 world without his aid. It was a true scientific 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 

 dare we not, perhaps, say the very greatest? that 

 science has ever conferred upon humanity. 



A few months after the use of ether became general, 

 the Scotch surgeon Sir J. Y. Simpson 8 discovered that 

 another drug, chloroform, could be administered with 

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

 duce anaesthesia 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 

 anaesthesia. Even had some other drug subsequently 

 quite banished ether, the honor of the discovery of the 

 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. 



PASTEUR AND THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE 



The 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 



217' 



