The following morning a manufacturing chemist was pressed into service, and had to burn the midnight oil to meet Simpson's demand for the new substance. So great was Simpson's midwifery practice that he was able to make immediate trial of chloroform, and on November 10th he read a paper to the Medico-Chirurgical Society, describing the nature of his agent, and narrating cases in which he had already successfully used it. "I have never had the pleasure," he said, "of watching over a series of better and more rapid recoveries; nor once witnessed any disagreeable results follow to either mother or child; whilst I have now seen an immense amount of maternal pain and agony saved by its employment. And I most conscientiously believe that the proud mission of the physician is distinctly twofold--namely to alleviate human suffering as well as preserve human life." In a postscript to the same paper he states on November 15th that he had already administered chloroform to about fifty individuals without the slightest bad result, and gives an account of the first surgical cases in which he gave the agent to patients of his friends, Professor Miller and Dr. Duncan, in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. "A great collection," he says, "of professional gentlemen and students witnessed the results, and amongst them Professor Dumas, of Paris, the chemist who first ascertained and established the chemical composition of chloroform. He happened to be passing through Edinburgh, and was in no small degree rejoiced to witness the wonderful physiological effects of a substance with whose chemical history his own name was so intimately connected." Four thousand copies of this paper were sold in a few days, and many thousands afterwards. It is worthy of mention that, according to a promise, Professor Miller had sent for Simpson a few days after the discovery to give chloroform to a patient on whom he was about to perform a major operation; Simpson, however, was unavoidably prevented from attending, and Miller began the operation without him--at the first cut of the knife the patient fainted and died. It is easy to imagine what a blow to Simpson, and to the cause of anaesthesia this would have been had it happened while the patient was under chloroform. Thus in little more than a year from the date of Morton's discovery of the powers of ether, Simpson had crowned the achievement by the discovery of the equally wonderful and beneficial powers of chloroform. Already he had made two satisfactory answers to the question he had early set himself--first, the application of anaesthesia to midwifery practice; and, second, the discovery of the properties of the more portable and manageable chloroform; the third, and perhaps the greatest, the defence of the practice, and the beating down of the powerful opposition to anaesthesia was yet required to render his reply complete. CHAPTER VII THE FIGHT FOR ANAESTHESIA. 1847 ONWARDS