“The news went like wildfire, and anæsthesia was soon introduced into every clinic and at almost every operation throughout the civilized world. Prior to that time a surgical operation was attended with horrors which those who live in these days cannot appreciate. He was the best surgeon who could perform any operation in the least possible time. The whole object of new methods of operating was to shorten the period of frightful agony which every patient had to endure. Every second of suffering saved was an incalculable boon. To submit to any operation required then a heroism and an endurance which is almost incomprehensible to us now. All of the more modern, deliberate, careful, painstaking operations, involving minute dissection, amid nerves and blood-vessels, when life or death depends on the accuracy of almost every touch of the knife, were absolutely impossible. It was beyond human endurance quietly to submit one’s self for an hour, for an hour and a half, for two hours, or even longer, to such physical agony. “It is a striking commentary on the immediate results of anæsthesia to learn that, in five years before the introduction of ether, only one hundred and eighty-four persons were willing to submit themselves to such a dreadful ordeal in the Massachusetts General Hospital—an average of thirty-seven operations per annum, or three per month.... During the last year, in the same hospital—a Mecca for every surgeon the world over—over thirty-seven hundred operations were performed. It is not an uncommon thing at the present day for any one of the more active surgeons of this country to do as many as four or five hundred operations in a year. I have known as many as nineteen operations to be done in the Jefferson Medical College Hospital in a single day—equalling six months’ work in Boston before the introduction of ether.” The next year, 1847, witnessed the introduction of chloroform by Sir James Y. Simpson, of Edinburgh. Until I became acquainted with the striking figures just quoted, I had often wondered at the hospital scene in that most touching story, _Rab and His Friends_, by the late gifted and well-beloved physician, Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh. Nowadays students do not rush into the surgical amphitheatre when they learn that an operation is to be done, but it is taken as a matter of course, for practically every day many operations are done in most of our large hospitals. But, at the time when Rab’s mistress was operated upon, an operation, as has been stated, was a very rare event. Few had the fortitude to endure its dreadful pangs. Now, thanks to the blessed sleep of anæsthesia, sufferers from even the most dreadful disorders can have long and difficult operations done, accurate and tedious dissections made, and yet feel not a twinge of pain.