Fifty years ago to-day--that is to say, on the 16th of October, 1846,--there occurred an event which marks as distinct a step in human progress as almost any that could be named by the erudite historian. I refer to the first demonstration of the possibility of alleviating pain during surgical operations. Had this been the date of a terrible battle, on land or sea, with mutual destruction of thousands of human beings, the date itself would have been signalized in literature and would have been impressed upon the memory of every schoolboy, while the names of the great military murderers who commanded the opposing armies would have been emblasoned upon monuments and the pages of history. But this event was merely the conquest of pain and the alleviation of human suffering, and no one who has ever served his race by contributing to either of these results has been remembered beyond his own generation or outside the circle of his immediate influence. Such is the irony of fate. The world erects imposing monuments or builds tombs, like that of Napoleon, to the memory of those who have been the greatest destroyers of their race; and so Cæsar, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Richard the Lion-hearted, Gustavus Vasa, Napoleon and hundreds of other great military murderers have received vastly more attention, because of their race-destroying propensities and abilities, than if they had ever fulfilled fate in any other capacity. But the men like Sir Spencer Wells, who has added his 40,000 years of life to the total of human longevity, or like Sir Joseph Lister, who has shown our profession how to conquer that arch enemy of time past, surgical sepsis, or like Morton, who first publicly demonstrated how to bring on a safe and temporary condition of insensibility to pain, are men more worthy in our eyes of lasting fame, and much greater heroes of their times, and of all time,--yet are practically unknown to the world at large, to whom they have ministered in such an unmistakable and superior way. This much, then, by way of preface and reason for commemorating in this public way the semi-centennial of this really great event. Because the world does scant honor to these men we should be all the more mindful of their services, and all the more insistent upon their public recognition. Of all the achievements of the Anglo-Saxon race, I hold it true that the two greatest and most beneficent were the discovery of ether and the introduction of antiseptic methods,--one of which we owe to an American, the other to a Briton.