6 REPORT—1896. 
exhibited his method at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and after 
that event the great discovery spread rapidly over the civilised world. I 
witnessed the first operation in England under ether. It was performed by 
Robert Liston in University College Hospital, and it was a complete success. 
Soon afterwards I saw the same great surgeon amputate the thigh as 
painlessly, with less complicated anesthetic apparatus, by aid of another 
agent, chloroform, which was being powerfully advocated as a substitute 
for ether by Dr. (afterwards Sir James Y.) Simpson, who also had the 
great merit of showing that confinements could be conducted painlessly, 
yet safely, under its influence. These two agents still hold the field as 
general anesthetics for protracted operations, although the gas originally 
suggested by Davy, in consequence of its rapid action and other advan- 
tages, has taken their place in short operations, such as tooth extraction. 
In the birthplace of anesthesia ether has always maintained its ground ; 
but in Europe it was to a large’ extent displaced by chloroform till 
recently, when many have returned to ether, under the idea that, though less 
convenient, it is safer. For my own part, I believe that chloroform, if 
carefully administered on right principles, is, on the average, the safer 
agent of the two. 
The discovery of anesthesia inaugurated a new era in surgery. Not 
only was the pain of operations abolished, but the serious and sometimes 
mortal shock which they occasioned to the system was averted, while the 
patient was saved the terrible ordeal of preparing to endure them. At 
the same time the field of surgery became widely extended, since many 
procedures in themselves desirable, but before impossible from the pro- 
tracted agony they would occasion, became matters of routine practice. 
Nor have I by any means exhausted the list of the benefits conferred by 
this discovery. 
Anesthesia in surgery has been from first to last a gift of science. 
Nitrous oxide, sulphuric ether, and chloroform are all artificial products 
of chemistry, their employment as anesthetics was the result of scientific 
investigation, and their administration, far from being, like the giving of 
a dose of medicine, a matter of rule of thumb, imperatively demands the 
vigilant exercise of physiological and pathological knowledge. 
While rendering such signal service to surgery, anesthetics have 
thrown light upon biology generally. It has been found that they exert 
their soporific influence not only upon vertebrata, but upon animals so 
remote in structure from man as bees and other insects. Even the func- 
tions of vegetables are suspended by their agency. They thus afford 
strong confirmation of the great generalisation that living matter is of 
the same essential nature wherever it is met with on this planet, whether 
in the animal or vegetable kingdom. Anzsthetics have also, in ways to 
which I need not here refer, pewerrelly promoted the progress of physio- 
logy and pathology. 
My next illustration may be taken from the work of Pasteur on fer- 
