Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/47

 THE PRINCIPLES OF SURGERY xxxvii

later becoming Wells's partner; how, while at Harvard Medical School, he was an office student of Charles P. Jackson, the physician and chemist; and after much experimentation on animals, upon himself, and upon dental patients, he finally established the value of ether anesthesia. The long controversies as to whether the credit for the discovery of anesthesia belongs to Crawford W. Long, of Danielsville, Georgia, who removed a small tumor from a negro's neck under ether anesthesia as early as 1842, or to Jackson or Wells, both of whom also laid claim to the credit for this discovery will still be remembered. Sir James Paget has summed up their relative claims very well: " While Long waited and Wells turned back and Jackson was thinking, and those to whom they had talked were neither acting nor thinking, Morton, the practical man, went to work and worked resolutely, he gave ether successfully in severe surgical operations, he loudly proclaimed his deeds, and he compelled mankind to hear him." Whatever our decision may be as to the relative merits of the claims of these different men, they were all Americans, and the credit for the discovery of anesthesia certainly belongs to America.

The unprej udiced student of the world's surgery, from American Colon- ial times to the present, can hardly escape conviction that the achieve- ments of early Americans were of equally high significance in medical science as were those of their countrymen in statesmanship and war. These early American surgeons were of good British, Dutch, German and French descent and traditions, many of them students of the acknowl- edged masters of their day. They came from town and hamlet, in New York, Pennsylvania and New England, and from the then frontier outposts of Kentucky and Wisconsin, from the Carolinas and Georgia, and from newly-settled Ohio and Indiana. Few states failed to furnish a surgeon of noteworthy achievement, even as they furnished soldiers for the wars. They were trained in orignal, inventive thinking, and aggressive, forceful action by a thousand conditions of their pioneer lives. It would have been strange if men of such training and tradition had attained so much in other lines of activity and failed in work of such practical significance as surgery. During many years in which the American profession whs ignored and ridiculed in the older centers of education, our surgeons were successfully undertaking operations in abdominal, brain, thoracic and bone surgery which had never been thought of by their European masters of that time. A few names of those truly remarkable men, like Ephraim McDowell, Nathan Smith, and Marion Sims, are quite generally known and honored; a much larger number are unknown even to the majority of their own countrymen, who more often credit French, German, or English workers with priority. It should be a matter of patriotic pride with American citizens to know and credit our pioneers with achieve-