Thus far we have dealt chiefly with those developments of medicine that seem to have been the outgrowth of much thought and experiment, but there was one that can hardly be viewed as other than a happy discovery, yet it was one that was fraught with unspeakable mitigation of human suffering, and that wrought a boundless extension of the field of surgery.  It was that of anaesthesia.  The first to discover an efficient surgical anaesthetic was Crawford W. Long, of Georgia.  It has been established that he performed several minor operations with the patient anaesthetized with sulphuric ether, but he did not proclaim his discovery, 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