Ambroise Tranquille Sassard, principal surgeon of the Hospital la Charité at Paris, recommended the employment of a narcotic previous to serious and painful operations, the dose to be proportioned to the age and strength of the patient.[[17]] He does not state whether the plan was actually tried.
Mr. James Moore, surgeon,[[18]] recommended compression of the large nerves, and tried it on a patient in St. George’s Hospital, whose leg Mr. John Hunter amputated below the knee. The crural and sciatic nerves were compressed for nearly an hour by an instrument contrived for the purpose, and Mr. Moore considered that the greater part of the pain was prevented. The patient complained more of the sawing of the bone than of the cutting part of the operation. I am not aware whether this plan was tried in other instances, but it is certain that it did not come into general use.
M. le docteur Liégard (de Caen) has stated,[[19]] that the peasants in his part of France are in the habit of tying a band very tightly round the arm or leg before operations on the extremities. He had himself removed a toe-nail in two cases, without pain, after a handkerchief had been tied very tightly round the lower part of the leg. By this measure both the nerves and blood vessels are, of course, more or less compressed.
The persons who believe in the existence of a force or power, which they call Mesmerism, or animal magnetism, made many and persevering efforts in recent times to cause insensibility to the surgeon’s knife. In some cases they were imposed on by dishonest and designing patients, who afterwards confessed they had suffered the pain to which they had pretended to be insensible, but in other cases I have no doubt of the operations having really been performed without pain. Absence of consciousness and sensation is a common symptom in many cases of hysteria and catalepsy, and in certain susceptible persons, hysteria and catalepsy, or conditions nearly resembling them, can be induced by acting on the imagination, or by exhausting the attention by means of the fixed stare and monotonous “passes” of the so-called Mesmerisers.
Dr. Esdaile was more successful in putting Hindoos to sleep, and operating on them in the hypnotized[[20]] state, than any one has been with Europeans: yet it was only in a portion of the cases in which it was tried that the alleged agent took effect. In many instances, efforts continued for two or three months had no effect on the patient; and in many of the operations, which were reported as successful, “there was much convulsive movement of the limbs, corrugation of the brows, and even loud cries and sobs,” although the patients afterwards denied all knowledge of what had passed.[[21]]
The discovery of the means of preventing pain, which will occupy the greater number of the following pages, did not arise out of any of the attempts either in ancient or modern times above enumerated. It sprung directly from the practice of inhaling chemical and medicinal substances.
The custom of inhaling the fumes of narcotic plants existed at the very commencement of the historic period, as appears by the following passages from Herodotus. Speaking of the people who inhabited some small islands on the river Araxes, which flows into the Caspian Sea, he says,[[22]] “They add that they have discovered other trees that produce fruit of a peculiar kind, which the inhabitants, when they meet together in companies, and have lit a fire, throw on the fire as they sit round in a circle; and that by inhaling the fumes of the burning fruit that has been thrown on, they become intoxicated by the odour, just as the Greeks do by wine; and that the more fruit is thrown on, the more intoxicated they become, until they rise up to dance and betake themselves to singing.”
Again, when treating of the funeral ceremonies of the Scythians, he says,[[23]] “When they have set up three pieces of wood, leaning against each other, they extend round them woollen cloths; and having joined them together as closely as possible, they throw red-hot stones into a vessel placed in the middle of the pieces of wood and the cloths. They have a sort of hemp growing in this country very like flax, except in thickness and height; in this respect the hemp is far superior: it grows both spontaneously and from cultivation; and from it the Thracians make garments very like linen, nor would any one who is not well skilled in such matters distinguish whether they are made of flax or hemp, but a person who has never seen this hemp would think the garment was made of flax. When, therefore, the Scythians have taken some seed of this hemp, they creep under the cloths, and then put the seed on the red-hot stones; but this, being put on, smokes, and produces such a steam, that no Grecian vapour-bath would surpass it. The Scythians, transported with the vapour, shout aloud; and this serves them instead of washing, for they never bathe the body in water.”
Mental illusions of all kinds have frequently been looked on as divine revelations, not only by savages, but even by nations having a considerable amount of civilization. The priestess at Delphos became intoxicated with the fumes of narcotic plants before delivering her oracular responses, and it is a curious circumstance that when America was discovered by Columbus, it was the custom of the Indians to throw tobacco on the fire during their religious ceremonies, when the piaches, or priests, who officiated, were thrown into a state of ecstatic inebriation by the smoke they inhaled.
I have already stated my belief that the Indian hemp administered, previous to surgical operations, in China, by Hoa-tho, in the beginning of the third century of our era, was exhibited by inhalation.