Long and his discovery / by I.H. Goss.

  • Goss, I. H. (Isham Hamilton), 1853-1921.
Date:
[1908?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Long and his discovery / by I.H. Goss. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    so many years stood upon the very brink of a great discovery, no one ventured over the threshold.” That the practical understanding of anaesthesia finally came, and came in an unexpected, indirect way, if such knowledge may ever be called indirect, is known to all within the sound of my voice. It is my privilege and my pleasure today to memorialize the great discoverer of anaesthesia, both because of his valuable work, and because the United States, the State of Georgia, and our medical association may claim him as their own. On the first day of November, 1815, Crawford W. Long was born in the State of Georgia, in the village of Danielsville, a place of such modest proportions as to merit the affirmation of Washington Irving when he aid: “Genius loves to bring forth her offsprings in by-corners. She seems to delight in dis¬ appointing the assiduities of art, and to glory in the vigor of chance productions. She scatters her seeds to the winds, and though some may perish among stony places, others struggle bravely up into sunshine.” The ancestry of the discoverer of anaesthesia was highly re¬ spectable. His paternal grandfather, Captain Samuel Long, of Pennsylvania, distinguished himself during the Revolutionary War; he was one of General Lafayette’s officers at Yorktown, and saw the independence of his country triumphantly established. He moved to Georgia, and here his son, James Long, became a superior scholar, a profound student of the law, was for years a member of the Senate, and was regarded as one of the promi¬ nent men of the commonwealth. James Long was an intimate friend of Georgia’s great statesman, William H. Crawford, and as a result of this friendly relation he gave to his first born son the name of Crawford. If it were possible to penetrate the remote and occult sources of character and temperament as they are transmitted from one generation to another, perhaps we might trace the force and beau¬ ty which governed the life of Crawford W. Long, to the endur¬ ing impressions stamped upon his imagination by the sentiments of his distinguished parentage. Be that as it may, he certainly had no cause to be ashamed of his ancestry. We have no superstitious veneration for that which is termed “blue blood,” especially when it is the reproach of degenerate offspring, but we very properly rejoice with the man who can trace his descent from an honored line.