Page:The First Anesthetic, the Story of Crawford Long - Frank Kells Boland.djvu/15



It is noteworthy that although books and poems were written in previous centuries recommending various drugs and methods to relieve pain and cause sedation and sleep, very few agents were ever actually employed to prevent the suffering attending surgical operations. If means were used for this purpose very little is said about them in literature. Meager was the history of the early attempts at anesthesia, even up to the day when successful anesthesia was introduced. Formerly medicine was taught by didactic lectures; there was but little presentation of cases. The so-called anesthesia of our ancestors apparently followed a similar course: The subject seemed to be more philosophical and poetical than practical. In the meantime patients submitting to operative procedures underwent indescribable agonies.

Fortunately operations were few and far between as compared with modern times, and only such surgery was undertaken as could be performed with the utmost rapidity. Cutting for bladder stone probably required the longest time, often as much as half an hour, but amputations of large