Victory over Pain

Abstract

THE discovery of anæsthesia, the centenary of which has just been celebrated, was one of the most important happenings in the history of mankind. The publishers of the volume under notice did well to produce it with such care and in such satisfying style ; Dr. Robinson has appreciated the magnitude of his task and has magnificently overcome many of the difficulties that beset the historian of his subject. Indeed, the first two thirds of his book are excellent. Rapidly reviewing and rightly dismissing the stories of classical and medieval ‘anæsthesia', he describes the unhappy years between 1799 and 1846 in graphic studies of Davy, Hickman and Wells, each of whom scored a ‘near miss' on the target of painless surgery. Then follows the triumphal story of Morton‘s demonstration on the morning of October 16, 1846. This was a tremendous event ; Dr. Robinson presents it calmly but with firm insistence on its importance. There follow descriptions of Jackson, the would-be ‘spiritual father' of the discovery, and of Long, who had practised etherization as early as 1842 without troubling to inform a pain-racked world. These are a mild anticlimax as compared with the actual descent from the heights into the infamous and damnable ‘ether controversy' which arose between Morton, Jackson and Long. As a storyteller, Dr. Robinson is no doubt right to dismiss what is beneath contempt as also beneath notice; as a historian, he is wrong.

Victory over Pain

A History of Anesthesia. By Dr. Victor Robinson. Pp. xiv + 338 + 30 plates. (London : Sigma Books, Ltd., 1947.) 16s. net.