A narrative of events connected with the introduction of sulphuric ether into surgical use / By Richard Manning Hodges.

  • Richard Hodges
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A narrative of events connected with the introduction of sulphuric ether into surgical use / By Richard Manning Hodges. 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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    after the alleged occurrence, wherein he stated that about the time of Wells's first painless tooth-extraction, he [Marcy] performed the operation above described on the young man alluded to, but whose name he declared he had forgotten. There is no evidence whatever that Wells made any allusion to sulphuric ether when, in 1845, he communicated the successful result of his earlier exhibition of nitrous-oxide gas to Dr. Morton and Dr. Jackson, at the time of his unfortunate experiment in Boston. In Wells's letter of December 7, 1846, there is not the slightest intimation that sulphuric ether had been used as an anaesthetic prior to Morton's de- monstration of September 30. Nor in this letter does Wells pretend to anything but speaking of sulphuric ether, — then more than two months in use,—to Dr. Marcy, and rejecting it by his advice. In the subsequent letter, however, pub- lished while Wells was in Paris, in Galignani's Messenger, of February 7,1847, he says: Since this discovery [of surgical anaesthesia] was first made, I have administered nitrous-oxide gas and the vapor of sulphuric ether to about fifty patients,—leaving it to be inferred by the cursory reader, though it is by no means dis- tinctly stated, that he had used sulphuric ether