A History of Science, vol 4 by Henry Smith Williams (the two towers ebook .TXT) 📕

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