The discovery might already be deemed complete, for the trials of the next following days had the same success, and thence onwards the use of the ether extended over constantly widening fields. A coarse but feeble opposition was raised by some American dentists; a few surgeons were over-cautious in their warnings against suspected dangers; a few maintained that pain was very useful, necessary perhaps to sound healing; some were hindered by their dislike of the patent which Morton and Jackson took out; but as fast as the news could be carried from one continent to another, and from town to town, so fast did the use of ether spread. It might almost be said that in every place, at least in Europe, where the discovery was promoted more quickly than in America, the month might be named before which all operative surgery was agonizing, and after which it was painless.
But there were other great pains yet to be prevented, the pains of childbirth. For escape from these the honour and deep gratitude are due to Sir James Simpson. No energy, or knowledge, or power of language less than his could have overcome the fears that the insensibility, which was proved to be harmless in surgical operations and their consequences, should be often fatal or very mischievous in parturition. And to these fears were added a crowd of pious protests (raised, for the most part, by men) against so gross an interference as this seemed with the ordained course of human nature. Simpson, with equal force of words and work, beat all down; and by his adoption of chloroform as a substitute for ether promoted the whole use of anæsthetics.
Ether and chloroform seemed to supply all that could be wished from anæsthetics. The range of their utility extended; the only question was as to their respective advantages, a question still unsettled. Their potency was found absolute, their safety very nearly complete, and, after the death of Wells in 1848, nitrous oxide was soon neglected and almost forgotten. Thus it remained till 1862, nearly seventeen years, when Mr. Colton, who still continued lecturing and giving the gas “for fun,” was at New Haven, Connecticut. He had often told what Wells had done with nitrous oxide at Hartford, and he wanted other dentists to use it, but none seemed to care for it till, at New Britain, Dr. Dunham asked him to give it to a patient to whom it was thought the ether might be dangerous. The result was excellent, and in 1863 Dr. Smith of New Haven substituted the nitrous oxide for ether in his practice and used it very frequently. In the nine months following his first use of it, he extracted without pain nearly 4,000 teeth. Colton, in the following year, associated himself with a dentist in New York and established the Colton Dental Association, where the gas was given to many thousands more. Still, its use was very slowly admitted. Some called it dangerous, others were content with chloroform and ether, others said that the short pangs of tooth-drawing had better be endured. But in 1867 Mr. Colton came to Paris and Dr. Evans at once promoted his plan. In 1868 he came to London and, after careful study of it at the Dental Hospital, the nitrous oxide was speedily adopted, both by dentists and by the administrators of anæsthetics. By this time it has saved hundreds of thousands of people from the sharp pains of all kinds of operations on the teeth and of a great number of the surgical operations that can be quickly done.
Such is the history of the discovery of the use of anæsthetics. Probably, none has ever added so largely to that part of happiness which consists in the escape from pain. Past all counting is the sum of happiness enjoyed by the millions who, in the last three-and-thirty years, have escaped the pains that were inevitable in surgical operations; pains made more terrible by apprehension, more keen by close attention; sometimes awful in a swift agony, sometimes prolonged beyond even the most patient endurance, and then renewed in memory and terrible in dreams. These will never be felt again. But the value of the discovery is not limited by the abolition of these pains or the pains of childbirth. It would need a long essay to tell how it has enlarged the field of useful surgery, making many things easy that were difficult, many safe that were too perilous, many practicable that were nearly impossible. And, yet more variously, the discovery has brought happiness in the relief of some of the intensest pains of sickness, in quieting convulsion, in helping to the discrimination of obscure diseases. The tale of its utility would not end here; another essay might tell its multiform uses in the study of physiology, reaching even to that of the elemental processes in plants, for these, as Claude Bernard has shown, may be completely for a time suspended in the sleep produced by chloroform or ether.
And now, what of the discoverers?[1] What did time bring to those who brought so great happiness to mankind?
Probably most people would agree that Long, Wells, Morton and Jackson deserved rewards, which none of the four received. But that which the controversy and the patent and the employment of legal advisers made it necessary to determine was, whether more than one deserved reward, and, if more than one, the proportion to be assigned to each. Here was the difficulty. The French Academy of Sciences in 1850 granted equal shares in the Monthyon Prize to Jackson and to Morton; but Long was unknown to them, and, at the time of the award, the value of nitrous oxide was so hidden by the greater value of ether that Wells's claim was set aside. A memorial column was erected at Boston, soon after Morton's death in 1868, and here the difficulty was shirked by dedicating the column to the discovery of ether, and not naming the discoverers. The difficulty could not be thus settled; and, in all probability, our supposed council of four or five would not solve it. One would prefer the claims of absolute priority; another those of suggestive science; another the courage of bold adventure; sentiment and sympathy would variously affect their judgments. And if we suppose that they, like the American Congress, had to discuss their differences within sound of such controversies as followed Morton's first use of ether, or during a war of pamphlets, or under burdens of parliamentary papers, we should expect that their clearest decision would be that a just decision could not be given, and that gratitude must die if it had to wait till distributive justice could be satisfied. The gloomy fate of the American discoverers makes one wish that gratitude could have been let flow of its own impulse; it would have done less wrong than the desire for justice did. A lesson of the whole story is that gratitude and justice are often incompatible; and that when they conflict, then, usually, “the more right the more hurt.”
Another lesson, which has been taught in the history of many other discoveries, is clear in this—the lesson that great truths may be very near us and yet be not discerned. Of course, the way to the discovery of anæsthetics was much more difficult than it now seems. It was very difficult to produce complete insensibility with nitrous oxide till it could be given undiluted and unmixed; this required much better apparatus than Davy or Wells had; and it was hardly possible to make such apparatus till india-rubber manufactures were improved. It was very difficult to believe that profound and long insensibility could be safe, or that the appearances of impending death were altogether fallacious. Bold as Davy was, bold even to recklessness in his experiments on himself, he would not have ventured to produce deliberately in any one a state so like a final suffocation as we now look at unmoved. It was a boldness not of knowledge that first made light of such signs of dying, and found that what looked like a sleep of death was as safe as the beginning of a night's rest. Still, with all fair allowance for these and other difficulties, we cannot but see and wonder that for more than forty years of the nineteenth century a great truth lay unobserved, though it was covered with only so thin a veil that a careful physiological research must have discovered it. The discovery ought to have been made by following the suggestion of Davy. The book in which he wrote that “nitrous oxide—capable of destroying physical pain—may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations,” was widely read, and it would be hard to name a man of science more widely known and talked of than he was. Within two years of the publication of his Researches he was appointed to a professorship in the Royal Institution; and in the next year he was a favourite in the fashionable as well as in the scientific world; and all his life through he was intimately associated with those among whom all the various motives for desiring to find some means “capable of destroying physical pain” would be most strongly felt. Curiosity, the love of truth, the love of marvels, the desire of ease, self-interest, benevolence,—all were alert in the minds of men and women who knew and trusted whatever Davy said or wrote, but not one mind was earnestly directed to the rare promise which his words contained. His own mind was turned with its full force to other studies; the interest in surgery which he may have felt during his apprenticeship at Bodmin was lost in his devotion to poetry, philosophy, and natural science, and there is no evidence that he urged others to undertake the study which he left. Even his biographers, his brother, Dr. John Davy, and his intimate friend, Dr. Paris, both of whom were very capable physicians and men of active intellect, say nothing of his suggestion of the use of nitrous oxide. It was overlooked and utterly forgotten till the prophecy was fulfilled by those who had never heard of it. The same may be said of what Faraday, if it were he, wrote of the influence of sulphuric ether. All was soon forgotten, and the clue to the discovery, which would have been far easier with ether than with nitrous oxide, for it needed no apparatus and even required mixture with air, was again lost. One could have wished that the honour of bringing so great a boon to men, and so great a help in the pursuit of knowledge, had been won by some of those who were giving themselves with careful cultivation to the search for truth as for its own sake. But it was not so: science was utterly at fault; and it was shown that in the search for truth there are contingencies in which men of ready belief and rough enterprise, seeking for mere utility even with selfish purposes, can achieve more than those who restrain themselves within the range of what seems reasonable.
Such instances of delay in the discovery of truth are always wondered at, but they are not uncommon. Long before Jenner demonstrated the utility of vaccination it was known in Gloucestershire that they who had had cow-pox could not catch the small-pox. For some years before the invention of electric telegraphy, Professor Cumming of Cambridge, when describing to his class the then recent discovery by Oersted of the power of an electric current to deflect a magnet, used to say, “Here, then, are the elements which would excellently serve for a system of telegraphy.” Yet none of his hearers, active and cultivated as they were, were moved from the routine of study. Laennec quotes a sentence from Hippocrates which, if it had been worthily studied, might have led to the full discovery of auscultation [trained listening to sounds]. Thus it often has been; and few prophecies can be safer than that our successors will wonder at us as we do at those before us; will wonder that we did not discern the great truths which they will say were all around us, within reach of any clear, earnest mind.
They will wonder, too, as we may, when we study the history of the discovery of anæsthetics, at the quietude with which habitual miseries are borne; at the very faint impulse to action which is given by even great necessities when they are habitual. Thinking of the pain of surgical operations, one would think that men would have rushed after the barest chance of putting an end to it as they would have rushed to escape from starving. But it was not so; the misery was so frequent, so nearly customary, deemed so inevitable, that, though it excited horror when it was talked of, it did not excite to strenuous action. Remedies were wished for and sometimes tried, but all was done vaguely and faintly; there was neither hope enough to excite intense desire, nor desire enough to encourage hope; the misery was “put up with” just as we now put up with typhoid fever and sea-sickness, with local floods and droughts, with the waste of health and wealth in the pollution of rivers, with hideous noises and foul smells, and many other miseries. Our successors, when they have remedied or prevented them, will look back on them with horror, and on us with wonder and contempt for what they will call our idleness or blindness or indifference to suffering.