“No, sir. The nation adopted the expression, and I always thought there would have been more ostentation in denying than in submitting to the report. The nation adopted it.”
Machine Politics
The term “machine politics” has been traced to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who said, in one of his notebooks, “One thing, if no more, I have gained by my custom-house experience—to know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or power of sympathy could have taught me; because the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature.”
Anæsthesia
Dr. Marion Sims summarized as follows the successive steps leading up to practical demonstration:
1. That since 1800 the inhalation of nitrous oxide gas produced a peculiar intoxication, and even allayed headache and other minor pains.
2. That Sir Humphrey Davy proposed it as an anæsthetic in surgical operations.
3. That for more than fifty years the inhalation of sulphuric ether has been practised by the students in our New England Colleges as an excitant, and that its exhilarating properties are similar to those of nitrous oxide gas.
4. That the inhalation of sulphuric ether, as an excitant, was common in some parts of Georgia forty-five years ago, though not practised in the colleges.
5. That Wilhite was the first man to produce profound anæsthesia, which was done accidentally with sulphuric ether in 1839.