In 1862, I made an attempt to carry out local anaesthesia by exhaustion of blood from a part. I noticed that when three round cupping-glasses were applied to the body very close to each other, the clear triangular space left free within the rim of the mouths of the glasses was rendered white, brawny-like and insensible, when the suction of the glasses was complete. This was obviously due to the local abstraction of blood from the part; and I thought, consequently, that if I could exhaust the blood from the extremity of a limb, the exhausted part might be operated upon without pain.... I tried the process on myself, and finding it succeed, the operation of removing the nail of the greta toe, was tried on a patient, quite painlessly, the patient looking on and feeling nothing. But the proceeding was too long and cumbersome to admit of introduction into practice generally, though it indicated an important principle which may in some future day be utilized. In this research, no experiment on a lower animal was resorted to; I was myself the victim in all preliminary experiments. --------------------- The most numerous and extensive efforts for local anaesthesia have been those in which extreme cold has been employed to produce the benumbing effect. The earliest applications of cold originated between two and three hundred years ago in the fencing schools of Naples. A Neapolitan professor of training placed crushed ice in a flash of thin glass, and then applied the chilled glass to the skin, and held it there until the skin was frozen, in order that the cautery could be employed, or other small operations performed without the infliction of pain. The proceeding must have been most successful, and why it became lost is one of the mysteries of scientific research. It did remain lost until our own time.... I invented for the same purpose the ether spray process, in which a benumbing cold was produced by projecting a volatile liquid like ether or amylene, or a stream of compressed gas ... on the part to be anaesthetized. These methods have been so widely adopted that I need not enter into any description of them. I have merely to say that they were made without any aid of experiments of a painful kind on the lower animals.... The earliest experiment with ether spray was made on my own arm. --------------------- It is fortunate for me that I have been an eye-witness of the progress made in this department from its practical instauration. I recall the days when operations were performed without the aid either of general or local methods for abolishing pain. I have myself introduced new methods of anaesthesia, generally and locally; I have brought to trial a large number of new anaesthetics. By the invention of the lethal chamber I have had the delightful privilege of removing the taste and pain of death from probably a million of those friends of man, the faithful dogs.