Sir James Young Simpson and chloroform (1811-1870) / by H. Laing Gordon.

  • Gordon, H. Laing (Henry Laing)
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir James Young Simpson and chloroform (1811-1870) / by H. Laing Gordon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    of medicine which had successively supplanted each other since Hippocrates first taught, and urged men to found their knowledge upon what they actually saw— on observation and experiment; and that in the eighteenth century men like Cheyne, Heberden, Cullen, and the wonderful Jenner had appreciably assisted in developing medicine at the same time that Hunter was raising surgery nearer to the level of a science. But even while Simpson was growing out of childhood all the powers of such profes- sional giants as Bright, Addison, Abernethy, Astley Cooper, and Charles Bell, were insufficient to dispel the massive cloud of mystery and superstition which enveloped the practice of both medicine and surgery in this country and obscured whatever there was of truth in the teaching of these men. In the first decade or two of this century the medical profession had not yet entirely abandoned the use of the golden-headed cane, nor had what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls the solemn farce of overdrugging yet ceased. Humours, impostumes, iliac passions, and such like were still spoken of—terms now heard only amongst country-folks in remote districts and that rarely, or encountered in curious old medical pub- lications. Messes and abominations, prepared by the apothecaries according to more or less secret recipes handed down through the Middle Ages, were swallowed in good faith ; blood-letting was still a panacea ; and such remedies as that of holding a live puppy to the