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 i