The invention of anæsthetic inhalation, or, "Discovery of anæsthesia." / by William J. Morton.

  • Morton, William J. (William James), 1846-1920.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The invention of anæsthetic inhalation, or, "Discovery of anæsthesia." / by William J. Morton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that ether would only be applicable in cases in which its ef¬ fects’could be kept up by constant inhalation during the time of the performance of the operation ”—a state, in fact, so short in duration as to cause him, as he says in the next breath, “to deprive himself” of experimenting in even the ex¬ traction of teeth, the simplest, and most accessible of cases which occur in a country practice. Now, the extraction of a tooth is a very short operation. Dr. Long’s “ anaesthetic state ” must have been over in a twinkling. If it did not last long enough for tooth-pulling, it would hardly do for surgery. This, then, is the condition of affairs which Dr. Long dig¬ nifies with the title of Anaesthesia. It was easy enough in 1849 to apply the then familiarized terms to this crude “ state ” occurring in 1842 ; to write upon the tablets of the past the records of the present, teeming with new and fruitful demon¬ strations. But the anaesthetic state of to-day and since 1846 is of long duration—as long as the surgeon chooses to make it. In Dr. Long’s experiments it was shor,t; but why short ? Evidently because he found “constant inhalation,” i. e., con¬ stant breathing of the vapor, impossible. If this had been possible to him, he would have resorted to it. There was no more difficulty in 1842 than there is to-day in producing an an¬ aesthetic state of long duration, if Long had known that this could be done. Why limit his cases to a minimum, and de¬ prive himself of experimenting in such simple cases as tooth¬ pulling, if constant inhalation were known to him \ Clearly, he did not know it. Erase at this minute from human knowledge all that was taught and learned of Anaesthesia in 1846, all that is known of Anaesthesia to-day, and let the reader put himself in Dr. Long’s place—let him repeat in the hospitals of the land Dr. Long’s process without taking from or adding to it; let him produce with ether an “ anaesthetic state of short duration,” incapable of maintenance by constant inhalation—a condition so transitory, so inapplicable as to cause the experimenter him¬ self to deprive himself of its use in the very simplest of mi¬ nor operations which were constantly at hand—and we submit that this is an inadequate basis on which to rest a claim to be¬ ing an inventor or discoverer of ether Anaesthesia.