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this illuminative suggestion: “As nitrous oxide in its extensive
operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may
probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in
which no great effusion of blood takes place.”[4]
Unfortunately no one took advantage of this suggestion at the
time, and Davy himself became interested in other fields of
science and never returned to his physiological studies, thus
barely missing one of the greatest discoveries in the entire
field of science. In the generation that followed no one seems to
have thought of putting Davy’s suggestion to the test, and the
surgeons of Europe had acknowledged with one accord that all hope
of finding a means to render operations painless must be utterly
abandoned—that the surgeon’s knife must ever remain a synonym
for slow and indescribable torture. By an odd coincidence it
chanced that Sir Benjamin Brodie, the acknowledged leader of
English surgeons, had publicly expressed this as his deliberate
though regretted opinion at a time when the quest which he
considered futile had already led to the most brilliant success
in America, and while the announcement of the discovery, which
then had no transatlantic cable to convey it, was actually on its
way to the Old World.
The American dentist just referred to, who was, with one
exception to be noted presently, the first man in the world to
conceive that the administration of a definite drug might render
a surgical operation painless and to give the belief application
was Dr. Horace Wells, of Hartford, Connecticut. The drug with
which he experimented was nitrous oxide—the same that Davy had
used; the operation that he rendered painless was no more
important than the extraction of a tooth—yet it sufficed to mark
a principle; the year of the experiment was 1844.
The experiments of Dr. Wells, however, though important, were not
sufficiently demonstrative to bring the matter prominently to the
attention of the medical world. The drug with which he
experimented proved not always reliable, and he himself seems
ultimately to have given the matter up, or at least to have
relaxed his efforts. But meantime a friend, to whom he had
communicated his belief and expectations, took the matter up, and
with unremitting zeal carried forward experiments that were
destined to lead to more tangible results. This friend was
another dentist, Dr. W. T. G. Morton, of Boston, then a young man
full of youthful energy and enthusiasm. He seems to have felt
that the drug with which Wells had experimented was not the most
practicable one for the purpose, and so for several months he
experimented with other allied drugs, until finally he hit upon
sulphuric ether, and with this was able to make experiments upon
animals, and then upon patients in the dental chair, that seemed
to him absolutely demonstrative.
Full of eager enthusiasm, and absolutely confident of his
results, he at once went to Dr. J. C. Warren, one of the foremost
surgeons of Boston, and asked permission to test his discovery
decisively on one of the patients at the Boston Hospital during a
severe operation. The request 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
patient 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 accomplished.[5]
Swiftly as steam could carry it—slowly enough we should think it
to-day—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 scepticism
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 lingering 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 procedure 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 mankind to suffer needless agony. And so
within a few months after that initial operation at the Boston
Hospital in 1846, ether had made good its conquest of pain
throughout the civilized world. Only by the most active use of
the imagination can we of this present day realize the full
meaning of that victory.
It remains to be added that in the subsequent bickerings over the
discovery—such bickerings as follow every great advance—two
other names came into prominent notice as sharers in the glory of
the new method. Both these were Americans—the one, Dr. Charles
T. Jackson, of Boston; the other, Dr. Crawford W. Long, of
Alabama. As to Dr. Jackson, it is sufficient to say that he
seems to have had some vague inkling of the peculiar properties
of ether before Morton’s discovery. He even suggested the use of
this drug to Morton, not knowing that Morton had already tried
it; but this is the full measure of his association with the
discovery. Hence it is clear that Jackson’s claim to equal share
with Morton in the discovery was unwarranted, not to say absurd.
Dr. Long’s association with the matter was far different and
altogether honorable. By one of those coincidences so common in
the history of discovery, he was experimenting with ether as a
pain-destroyer simultaneously with Morton, though neither so much
as knew of the existence of the other. While a medical student he
had once inhaled ether for the intoxicant effects, as other
medical students were wont to do, and when partially under
influence of the drug he had noticed that a chance blow to his
shins was painless. This gave him the idea that ether might be
used in surgical operations; and in subsequent years, in the
course of his practice in a small Georgia town, he put the idea
into successful execution. There appears to be no doubt whatever
that he performed successful minor operations under ether some
two or three years before Morton’s final demonstration; 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 country practitioner.
And while he waited, Morton anticipated 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[6] discovered that another drug,
chloroform, could be administered with similar effects; that it
would, indeed, in many cases produce 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 unequivocally 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 quite
overshadowed 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, indeed, 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 vinous
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 upon in 1854
were aimed at the solution of a controversy that had been waging
in the scientific world with varying degrees of activity for a
quarter of a century. Back in the thirties, in the day of the
early enthusiasm over the perfected microscope, there had arisen
a new interest in the minute forms of life which Leeuwenhoek and
some of the other early workers with the lens had first
described, and which now were shown to be of almost universal
prevalence. These minute organisms had been studied more or less
by a host of observers, but in particular by the Frenchman
Cagniard Latour and the German of cell-theory fame, Theodor
Schwann. These men, working independently, had reached the
conclusion, about 1837, that the micro-organisms play a vastly
more important role in the economy of nature than any one
previously had supposed. They held, for example, that the minute
specks which largely make up the substance of yeast are living
vegetable organisms, and that the growth of these organisms is
the cause of the important and familiar process of fermentation.
They even came to hold, at least tentatively, the opinion that
the somewhat similar micro-organisms to be found in all
putrefying matter, animal or vegetable, had a causal relation to
the process of putrefaction.
This view, particularly as to the nature of putrefaction, was
expressed even more outspokenly a little later by the French
botanist Turpin. Views so supported naturally gained a
following; it was equally natural that so radical an innovation
should be antagonized. In this case it chanced that one of the
most dominating scientific minds of the time, that of Liebig,
took a firm and aggressive stand against the new doctrine. In
1839 he promulgated his famous doctrine of fermentation, in which
he stood out firmly against any “vitalistic” explanation of the
phenomena, alleging that the presence of micro-organisms in
fermenting and putrefying substances was
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