From his earliest student days the desire had ever been present in Simpson's mind to see some means devised for preventing the sufferings endured by patients on the operating table, without, as he put it, "interfering with the free and healthy play of the natural functions." It is difficult for us at the close of the nineteenth century to understand, without an effort of the imagination, the strong incentives which he had for such a wish. Even to-day, when operations are conducted without the infliction of pain, young students are not unfrequently overcome by the sight and the thought of what is in front of them. At the commencement of a winter session the theatre is crowded with those students who are entering upon surgical study, and with others, not so far advanced, who have come to get a preliminary peep at the practice of this fascinatingly interesting art. Many of these at first succumb and faint even before the surgeon has begun his work, and sometimes are only persuaded to pursue their studies by the encouragement of kindly teachers. Simpson also went through this trying experience, but it must have been a greater struggle to him to persist. The surroundings of the surgeon at the commencement of the century were vastly more repugnant to a youth of sensitive nature than to-day. The operating theatre then has been compared to a butcher's shambles; cleanliness was not considered necessary, and little attention was paid to the feelings of the patient. He was held down by three or four pairs of powerful arms as the surgeon boldly and rapidly did his work, despite the screams, stopping, perhaps, only to roughly abuse the patient for some agonised movement which had interfered with the course of action. The poor wretch saw the instruments handed one by one by the assistant, and heard the surgeon's calm directions and his remarks on the case. The barbarous practice of arresting bleeding by the application of red-hot irons to the surface of the wound had indeed ceased three centuries before, when that humane reformer, Pare, displaced it with the method of tying the open blood-vessel, but the patient's blood gushed forth before him until arrested, into the sawdust spread to receive it, and the sight and the hot odour of it oftentimes mercifully caused him to faint. The spirit of Pare who, when relating a successful operation, would humbly add at the end, "I dressed him; God healed him," had not descended to those who practised in Simpson's day the art for which Pare did so much. It had grown to be necessary for a surgeon to be rough and callous; it was expected of him by the public; he was a man to be pointed at in the street, and shuddered at when he passed, by all who devoutly prayed they might escape his clutches. Much of this conduct was mere mannerism; it had become the custom, and had to be maintained in order to preserve the dignity and stamp the identity of the surgeon. Much of it arose from the haste with which the surgeon