ue in some degree to his
constant practice throughout his life of performing every novel and
important operation upon a cadaver before operating upon the living
subject. To describe in detail the operations which he originated would
be too technical for such a book as this, but many of them were of the
first importance. Sir Astley Cooper said of him: "Dr. Mott has performed
more of the great operations than any man living, or that ever did
live." He possessed all the qualifications of a great operator,
extraordinary keenness of sight, steadiness of nerve, and physical
vigor. He could use his left hand as skillfully as his right, and
developed a dexterity which has never been surpassed.

It should be remembered that in those days the use of anaesthetics had
not yet been discovered, and every operation had to be performed upon
the conscious subject, as he lay strapped upon the table shrieking with
agony. To perform an operation under such circumstances required an iron
nerve. Dr. Mott was one of the first to recognize the value of
anaesthetics, and his use of them, immediately following their discovery,
greatly facilitated their rapid and general introduction.

It is one of the boasts of American medicine that the first man in the
world to conceive the idea that the administration of a definite drug
might render a surgical operation painless was an American--Crawford W.
Long. Dr. Long graduated from the medical department of the University
of Pennsylvania in 1839. When a student, he had once inhaled ether for
its intoxicant effects, and while partially under the influence of the
drug, had noticed that a chance blow to his shin produced no pain. This
gave him the idea that ether might be used in surgical operations, and
on March 30, 1842, at Jefferson, Georgia, he used it with entire
success. He repeated the experiment several times, but he did not
entirely trust the evidence of these experiments. So he delayed
announcing the discovery until he had subjected it to further tests, and
while these experiments were going on, another American, Dr. W. T. G.
Morton, of Boston, also hit upon the great discovery and announced it to
the world.

Dr. Morton was a dentist who, in 1841, introduced a new kind of solder
by which false teeth could be fastened to gold plates. Then, in the
endeavor to extract teeth without pain, he tried stimulants, opium and
magnetism without success, and finally sulphuric ether. On September 30,
1846, h