iscovery, and so it was reserved for William T. G. Morton, of Boston
(then a dentist, but subsequently a physician), to make the first public
demonstration of the efficiency of ether as an anaesthetic, which he did
in the operating theatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital, in
Boston, in the year 1846. The news of Morton's achievement spread
broadcast, and it was at once realized that it was destined to
revolutionize surgery. It certainly has done that, and in no less
degree than was afterward accomplished by Listerism. Ether did not long
remain the only anaesthetic known; Simpson, of Edinburgh, soon
discovered that chloroform was possessed of even more decided
anaesthetic properties. The inhalation of ether is disagreeable, and it
is slow in producing the desired effect, whereas that of chloroform is
not unpleasant, and it acts more rapidly. Consequently chloroform soon
came to be generally preferred; but abundant experience has finally
shown that ether is much the safer agent of the two, and improved
methods of administration have almost entirely done away with the
objections to its use, so that now it is looked upon as the preferable
general anaesthetic. But general anaesthesia--meaning the suspension of
sensibility in the whole organism, including unconsciousness--is not
always necessary, and sometimes it is undesirable. We have now
trustworthy local anaesthetics, the chief of which is cocaine, wherewith
we are able to anaesthetize the part to be operated on without rendering
the patient unconscious, and the co-operation that a conscious patient
may be able to render is sometimes valuable. It was not alone in the
direct saving of human suffering that anaesthetics proved a boon to the
world; they have made possible an amount of experimental work on animals
in the way of vivisection that humane investigators would otherwise have
shrunk from, necessary as it has been and still is for the advancement
of the healing art.

The operation of ovariotomy, first performed by Ephraim McDowell, of
Kentucky, can hardly be classed with the happy accidents; but so little
had been said about it or thought concerning it that when the news of it
reached Europe "from the wilds of America" the editor of a ponderous
English quarterly journal of medicine recorded his incredulity in the
words "_Credat Judoeus, non ego_" An ovarian tumor inevitably proves
fatal in the long run if it is not removed. In a certain percentage of
cases it is