Something more precious than gold came to light in 1846, something of more moment to human history than a dozen Mexican wars—a cure for pain.
It came divinely opportune to Patty’s need, for her next child was about to tear its way into the world through her flesh suffering from old lacerations, and she prophesied that she would die of agony and take back with her into oblivion the boy or girl or both or whatever it was or they were that she was helplessly manufacturing.
And just then there came to RoBards a letter from a Boston client stating that a dentist named Morton had discovered a gas that enabled him to extract a tooth without distress; another surgeon had removed a tumor from a patient made indifferent with ether; and that the long deferred godsend would make childbirth peaceable. Patty sang hosannas to the new worker of miracles.
“1846 is a greater year than 1776—or 1492. That man Morton is a bigger man than Columbus and there should be a holiday in his honor. What did the discoverer of America, or the inventor of the telegraph or anything else, do for the world to compare with the angel of mercy who put a stop to pain? The Declaration of Independence!—Independence from what?—taxes and things. But pain—think of independence from pain! Nothing else counts when something aches. And the only real happiness is to hurt and get over it.”
She repeated her enthusiasm to Dr. Chirnside when he happened in on his pastoral rounds. To her dismay the old clergyman was not elated, but horrified.
Dr. Chirnside, who opposed everything new as an atheism, everything amusing as a sin, declared that God decreed pain for his own inscrutable purposes in his own infinite love. Since Holy Writ had spoken of a woman crying aloud in travail it would be a sacrilege to deny her that privilege. The kindly old soul would have crucified a multitude for the sake of a metaphor. He had in his earlier days preached a sermon against railroads because God would have mentioned them to Moses or somebody if he had approved of having his creatures hurled through space at the diabolic speed of twenty miles an hour. He had denounced bowling alleys for the same reason, and also because they were fashionable and more crowded than his own pews.
RoBards having seen operations where the patient had to be clamped to a board and gagged for the sake of the neighbors’ ears, could not believe that this was a pleasant spectacle to any respectable deity.
He almost came to a break with Dr. Chirnside, who seemed to see nothing incongruous in calling that divine which men called inhuman.
All of the learned men called “doctors,” whether of divinity, medicine, law, philosophy, or what-not, seemed to fight everything new however helpful. Martyrdom awaited the reformer and the discoverer whether in religion, astronomy, geography, chemistry, geology, anything.
The names of well-meaning gentlemen like Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall had recently been howled at with an irate disgust not shown toward murderers and thieves.