Surgical experience of chloroform / By James Miller.

  • Miller, James, 1812-1864.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Surgical experience of chloroform / By James Miller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/62 (page 9)
    tender heart witnessing a bloody and severe operation, with composure and serenity; feeling little, because the patient felt not at all; and the little that he himself did feel, far more than compensated by the thought, that a brighter day for that suf¬ fering humanity, with which he so closely and continually sympathized, had at length dawned, and that, from henceforth, throughout the domain of surgery, injury and disease were shorn of half their terrors. By and bye, however, a panic threatened. A fatal case” was announced ; and it was whispered that there were many more, coming and come. The isle, for a time, was frighted from its propriety—or, at least, from its ether. The dead woman of Grantham, like Banquo’s ghost, w^as supposed to hold a glass which “ showed them many more.” The alarm was laid hold of, and worked, by the sexagenarians for¬ merly spoken of. They had foreseen it all. “ Bid we not say this would happen? Wait a little. This is only one ; the beginning of the end. He will be a bold man now, who shall venture to repeat the ether on a capital occasion.” For¬ tunately, however, there were bold men, not a few; and what is of more importance, men devoid of prejudice, and possessed of common sense, who saw through the clamour; who saw that the “ CrowneFs ’Quest Law” was miserable law, and at variance with both fact and experience; who saw that the “ fatal cases” were neither fatal to ether, nor fatal hy ether,— but were, in all probability, only fatal icith ether, just as they might have been fatal without it. Undeterred, therefore, by public panic, or professional prejudice, they held the even tenor of their way,—rendered doubly cautious doubtless,— but not a whit swerved from their honest and foregone deter¬ mination to sift truth to the bottom, and, in such a cause, to suffer no vain discouragement. The trial proceeded, and the safety as well as suitableness of Ansesthesia, by ether, became more and more established. But a new phase was at hand. My friend Dr. Simpson had long felt convinced that some anaesthetic agent existed superior to ether; and, in the end of October 1847, being then engaged in writing a paper on Etherization in Sur-