A consideration of the introduction of surgical anaesthesia / by William H. Welch.

  • Welch, William Henry, 1850-1934.
Date:
[1908]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A consideration of the introduction of surgical anaesthesia / by William H. Welch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    A CONSIDERATION OF THE INTRODUC- TION OF SURGICAL ANESTHESIA. * BY WILLIAM H. WELCH, M.D., LL.D. Professor of Pathology, fohns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. It is a happy conception of the trustees and staft of the Massachusetts General Hospital to set apart the sixteenth of October as Ether Day, and to provide for the annual public celebration, in this historic place, of the anniversary of that most beneficent gift of medicine to mankind, — the introduction of surgical anaesthesia. I esteem it a high honor to be invited to deliver the annual address in commemoration of the great event which took place within these walls sixty- two years ago to-day. Of the significance of this event there can be no question, whatever controversy there may be concerning the exact share of all who participated in the discovery of surgical anaesthesia. The attendant circumstances were such as to make the operation performed on Oct. 16, 1846, in the surgical amphitheater of this hospital, by John Collins Warren, upon the patient, Gilbert Abbott, placed in the sleep of ether anaesthesia by William Morton, the decisive event from which date the first convincing, public demonstration of surgical anaesthesia, the con- tinuous, orderly, historical development of the subject, and the promulgation to the world of the glad tidings of this conquest of pain. Had this demonstration or any subsequent one of like nature failed of success, it is improbable that we should have heard much of claims to the prior dis- * Address delivered at the Massachusetts General Hospital on the sixty-second anniversary of Ether Day.