diethyl ether (ch3ch2o and painless ddiethyl ether (ch3ch2)2o and painless dentistry and yet — in...

DIETHYL ETHER (CH3CH2)2O AND PAINLESS DENTISTRY

And yet — in fact you need only draw a single threadat any point you choose out of the fabric of lifeand the run will make a pathway across the whole,and down that wider pathway each of the other threadswill become successively visible, one by one.

— Heimito von Doderer, Die Dâimonen

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdf


2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

ANESTHESIA DENTISTRY

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NOTE: Some may feel that I have included too much technical material here, if what they are interested in is Thoreau’s approach to nature or his place in our literature –or if they are merely using these materials in order to escape from their own lives into a safe and more satisfying daydream state– but in fact after Henry Thoreau had his teeth pulled under sedation, the first thing he did was read up on dentistry. Also, this material is important in developing Waldo Emerson’s prolonged involvement in the controversy over the awarding of proper credit to this or that medical professional who was really truly-ruly the true innovator of anesthesia.

Ether was discovered by Raymundus Lullius (Raymund Lull), who termed it “sweet vitriol.”1

1275

1. At least, this is asserted. We are not, however, able to find anything to suggest this in any of Raymund Lull’s published writings.

WALDEN: The village appeared to me a great news room; and on oneside, to support it, as once at Redding & Company’s on StateStreet, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and othergroceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the formercommodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs thatthey can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and letit simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds,or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness andinsensibility to pain, –otherwise it would often be painful tohear,– without affecting the consciousness. I hardly ever failed,which I rambled through the village, to see a row of suchworthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves,with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing alongthe line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuousexpression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands intheir pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, beingcommonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These arethe coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digestedor cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicatehoppers within doors.

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdf


“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3

DENTISTRY ANESTHESIA

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The synthesis of ether (“sweet vitriol”) was described by Valerius Cordus. At about this time, Paracelsus was discovering its hypnotic effect.

W.G. Frobenius changed the name “sweet vitriol” to “ether.”

March 13 or 22: Joseph Priestley was born, the son of a cloth-dresser from Leeds. Among numerous other achievements as a Unitarian minister, author, and chemist, Priestley would in the 1770s isolate nitrous oxide. Because of his support of the French and American revolutions, Priestley would be forced to sail for America in the early 1790s, where he would settle in Pennsylvania. He would die and be buried there in 1804.

March 20: The Dutch chemist Martinus van Marum was born. From about 1790 to 1808 he would be an active member of the Society of Dutch Chemists, which would be studying gases –including nitrous oxide– and he would publish some 35 papers based on that research.

1540

1730

1733

1750

ANESTHESIA

ANESTHESIA






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The Reverend Joseph Priestley’s THE HISTORY AND PRESENT STATE OF DISCOVERIES RELATING TO VISION LIGHT, AND COLOURS speculated on the luminous quality of various animals and plants, such as glow-worms, and the cause of rainbows, halos, and other such luminous phenomena in the atmosphere.

In this year the Reverend discovered the nitrous oxide (laughing gas) with which college students would famously experiment, which eventually would prove to be useful as a dental anesthetic (for instance, in beautiful downtown Boston during the 1840s when Henry Thoreau had all his teeth pulled at once).

The Reverend William Paley resigned from his position as rector of Musgrave in Cumberland to become the vicar of the parishes of Appleby and Dalston.

The Reverend Joseph Priestley’s EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON AIR detailed his discoveries on the effects of various gases such as oxygen, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide on mice and other animals.

French troops, in Providence to support the American revolutionaries against their common enemy England, set up their encampment off Rochambeau Avenue at a place that would become known as Camp Street. We have an extract from the diary of one of these French officers stationed in Rhode Island.

Although opium was a known anodyne, the French surgeons would refuse to administer it to their soldier patients. Although this might possibly have been due to the French having considered there to be something wrong with opium in particular as a medical drug, there is also a possibility that they considered there to be something undesirable, or at the very least unnecessary, about relieving the suffering of a patient. That was an attitude which would prove to be all too prevalent among American doctors and dentists several generations later, with the introduction of ether and nitrous oxide. A number of our doctors and dentists would be reluctant to –how shall I put this– to by their own superior judgment override God’s clear will. An all too prevalent attitude was that this was supposed to hurt, people in such circumstances ought to be in great pain — that this is all a part of the grand process of life. I don’t have any clear understanding of the “religious” roots of this, and if anyone can offer insightful words which will help me better to understand that sort of attitude, I

1772

1776

1781

THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM

ANESTHESIA

BARON CROMOT DUBOURG

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/17/80DECADE/81/1781_BaronCromotDubourg.pdf






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would be most appreciative. I find it exceedingly strange and have difficulty imagining what the theological underpinnings of it might have been. My sense of the situation is that operative anesthesia would not come into general use until surgeons noticed that, by cutting down remarkably on the number of deaths due to post-operative shock, it offered them, priding themselves on the rapidity with which they could remove various body parts, competing with one another for hero status as the quickest sawbones, an opportunity to operate in less of a chop-chop hurry-up mode. If this was the situation several generations earlier as it would be the situation toward the middle of the 19th Century, then we should not hasten from the observation that the French Revolutionary-War surgeons here were reluctant to administer opium, to the conclusion that it was opiates in particular of which they were suspicious — it may be that they would likewise have refused to administer aspirin.

From about this year, until 1808, the Dutch chemist Martinus van Marum would be an active member of the Society of Dutch Chemists, which would be studying gases, including nitrous oxide, and he would be publishing some 35 papers based on that research.

During this decade Dr. James Graham (1745-1794), known as “the Emperor of Quacks,” an ether addict, would drop by his chemist’s shop two or three times a day to inhale the volatile liquid “with manifest placidity and self-enjoyment.” When asked by a fellow doctor what effects he felt, he replied, “Soothing ... soothing to an immeasurable degree.”

At Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institute in England, Richard Pearson and Thomas Beddoes used ether in the treatment of phthisis, catarrhal fever, bladder calculus, and scurvy.

When George Washington’s dentist, John Greenwood, returned from Europe he brought with him a keg of human teeth to be implanted in American mouths. (These teeth for implanting used to come from cadavers, from poor people selling their perfect teeth, and, even before Waterloo, from battlefields.)

1790

1794

1805

ANESTHESIA

DOPERS






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Dr. Levi Spear Parmly urged Americans to use a “waxen silk thread” between their teeth. This dental hygiene, the dentist believed, would be even more important for the health of their teeth than the toothbrush and tongue scraper (it appears that it was recognized that flossing was good for one’s teeth before anyone realized that it was even better for the health of one’s gums). The practitioner buttonholed passers-by on the street, if they seemed by the condition of their mouth to be in need of some sound advice, handing out samples of floss.

January 21, Saturday: Horace Wells was born in Hartford, Vermont.2

The assembled leaders in Vienna attended a requiem mass in St. Stephen’s Cathedral organized by Talleyrand, for Louis XVI on the 22d anniversary of the monarch’s execution. The requiem was conducted by Antonio Salieri.

From this date until March 9th, Lord and Lady Byron would be at Seaham, home of Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:

7th day 21st of 1st M 1815 / I have heard many speak of their satisfaction & edification at being at James Meeting last eveningThis eveng rode to Portsmouth with David Williams & lodged at Cousin Z Chases

March 5, Sunday: Upon the 12th meeting of the “Swiss Committee,” most issues of the Congress of Vienna were resolved (or so they supposed).

The German physician Franz Mesmer died. He had developed “Mesmerism,” a set of techniques we now know as hypnotism. Prior to the introduction of anesthesia in the late 1840s, this “Mesmerism” would be being very widely relied upon for surgical pain relief.Nancy Thoreau Billings died in Bangor, Maine, possibly due to complications of childbirth. Her widower Caleb Callender Billings would remarry on June 7, 1818, with the widowed Betsey Brown Hammond, a mature daughter of Reuben Brown of Concord.

1815

2. Wells’s drug experiments on himself would, on January 24, 1848, bring about his death.

LA GUILLOTINE

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS






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Edwin Forrest made his theatrical debut at the Walnut Street theatre in Philadelphia, in the tragedy Douglas.

At a demonstration of the effects of nitrous oxide, this 14-year-old continued to recite a long passage from Shakespeare’s Richard III even while under the influence.

The initial chemical analysis of nitric ether, by Boullay and Dumas.3

1820

1828

3. Basil Valentine had in the 14th Century distilled alcohol with sulfuric acid to produce ether, and in 1681 Kunkel had discovered nitric ether. In 1734 Gay-Lussac had discovered hydratic (incorrectly referred to as “sulphuric”) ether. The preparation of nitric ether, having been forgotten, was rediscovered in 1742 by Navier. Acetic ether had been prepared in 1759 by the Count de Lauragnais. Muriatic ether had been prepared in 1804 by Gehlen. (Œnanthic ether would not be prepared until 1836, by Liebig and Pelouze, and real sulphuric ether would not be prepared until 1848, by Wetherill.)






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July 1, Friday: Pirates Joseph Gadett and Thomas Colinett were hanged in the rear of Boston’s Leverett Street jail.

Robert Schumann, writing in his diary, for the 1st time mentioned his other alter-ego and twin to Florestan, Eusebius.

Jose Antonio de Oliveira Leite de Barros, conde de Basto replaced Nuno Caetano Alvares Pereira de Melo, duque de Cadaval as Prime Minister of Portugal.

Dr. Samuel Guthrie created chloroform in his private chemistry laboratory in Sackett’s Harbor, New York. Within a year, this chemical would be developed independently by the Frenchman Eugene Soubeiran and the German Justus von Leibig. Although none of them would consider using it as an anesthetic, the ether of chloroform would eventually be widely used in that manner — though today it has been replaced by less toxic substances.

The Geburtstagkantate Eilt herbei, des Hauses Glieder for chorus and piano by Otto Nicolai to words possibly by Gneinzius, was performed for the initial time for the birthday of Frau Landrathin Wilhelmine von Munchhausen.

Henry Thoreau lost a tooth.

During roughly this year, one pupil at the Concord Academy was Thomas Hosmer of Bedford, who would grow up to be a dentist in Boston, but who at this time was walking daily to Concord for classes. Many years later, in his instar as “adult Boston dentist,” this Thomas Hosmer would write to Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson and relate of his teacher Henry Thoreau that:

Another of the boys being taught in this year, presumably about 12 years of age, was the Cyrus Warren whom Thoreau would years later chance upon as a grown man walking along the sidewalk:

November 10, Monday, 1851: … In relation to politics–to society–aye to the whole out-ward world Iam tempted to ask–Why do they lay such stress on a particular experience which you have had?– That after 25years you should meet Cyrus Warren again on the sidewalk! Haven’t I budged an inch then?– 4 This dailyroutine should go on then like those–it must be conceded–vital functions of digestion–circulation of the blood

1831

1838

1839

DENTISTRY

I have seen children catch him by the hand, as he wasgoing home from school, to walk with him and hear more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schumann

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schumann






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&c which in health we know nothing about. A wise man is as unconscious of the movements in the body politicas he is of digestion & the circulation of the blood in the natural body. …

A discussion with Linus P. Brochett of Hartford, Connecticut showed that Horace Wells was deeply impressed with the idea that some discovery would yet be made by which dental and other operations might be performed without pain.

William Thomas Green Morton had been working as a clerk, printer, and salesman in Boston when he matriculated at the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery.

4. Thoreau was later to copy this into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:

1840

[Paragraph 61] In relation to politics, to what is called society—aye, often tothe whole outward world, I am often tempted to ask—why such stress is laidon a particular experience which you have had?—that after twenty-five yearsyou should meet Hobbins—registrar of deeds, again on the side-walk?1

Haven’t I budged an inch then?

1. There were no County Registrars of Deeds by the name of Hobbins in Massachusetts from 1823 to 1862.






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During the 1840s, the Professor of Anatomy at the Medical School of Harvard College, John Collins Warren, was crusading in Boston in opposition to the “senseless cruelty of the masses,” their debased politics, their corrupting lack of moral standards.If they know what is good for them, the people must pay heed to their superiors!

“Scientists have power by virtue of the respectcommanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorelytempted to misuse that power in furthering a personalprejudice or social goal — why not provide that extraoomph by extending the umbrella of science over apersonal preference in ethics or politics?”

— Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUSNY: Norton, 1991, page 429






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Some of these superiors to the common run of mankind would be the three main actors in the story of the discovery of anesthesia, William Thomas Green Morton, Charles T. Jackson and Horace Wells, three Harvard College dental students who after turning on with nitrous oxide during the 1840s, would fall to fighting over who should get the credit for this.

During this year ether was being introduced into northern Ireland as a preventive and folk remedy. Recreational drinking was spreading in the Ulster counties of Londonderry and Tyrone, possibly due to the example of a physician in Draperstown. Frolics produced either by inhalation or by drinking drops of ether in water were becoming common among youths of the upper classes both in Europe and in America.

Wells started it all by doing experiments with nitrous oxide but failed to follow through. Jackson put Morton onto sulfurous ether (CH3CH2)2O but it was Morton who thought out and performed the research, took the risks, and developed a safe and reliable method. In support of Morton’s claim mention is made of a Boston chemical supplier named Theodore Metcalf, and a maker of surgical instruments named Wightman. Only after the risks had been taken and the discovery accepted by the medical establishment did Jackson try to cash in, claiming that he had been the head and Morton merely the hands:






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• Horace Wells, 1817-1849 — this Boston dentist became a drug addict and committed suicide while in prison for a drug-related crime, receiving a prize from the French Academy of Sciences on the following day

• William Thomas Green Morton, 1819-1868 — this Boston dentist and former student of Charles T. Jackson’s had a bad track record for buying goods on credit, selling them and pocketing the money, and then failing to pay his bills. By the age of 21 he had already been “run out of town” in Worcester MA, Rochester NY, Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis in the Missouri territory, and Baltimore! He suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the rest of his life battling poverty; four times he would be voted a pension by Congress, but four times this would be reversed itself when Jackson and others pressed their claims, and the acknowledgment when it finally came was in the form of a mere gravestone terming him something like “the discoverer of ether-narcosis”

• Charles T. Jackson, chemistry professor at Harvard College who had earlier made an unsuccessful attempt to claim the credit for the invention of the telegraph — he went crazy at the sight of this William Thomas Green Morton monument and died in an asylum (Semmelweis also died in an insane asylum, after being beaten by the attendants, with Lister performing the 1st operation using antisepsis as well as anesthesia on the following day)

Beginning with this year, the Boston Society of Natural History would be publishing the record of their meetings:

Dr. William Thomas Green Morton became known for a new technique of soldering false teeth onto gold plates.

This had been the year, Charles T. Jackson of the Society later would allege, during which he had discovered the anesthetic properties of ether. It wasn’t merely that he had invented the electric telegraph and then watched as his idea was stolen by that painter scoundrel Samuel F.B. Morse (etc.) — he had benefited mankind and alleviated suffering and he ought to be famous! Not to mention wealthy!

This footnote in Ellen Emerson’s biography of her mother Lydian Emerson, Charles Jackson’s sister, concerns the claims:

1841

PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1841

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/41/1841_BSNHproceedings.pdf






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A concise statement of Jackson’s case is to be found in theanonymous “Presentation of Facts Relating to the Discovery ofthe Anaesthetic Effects of Ether Vapor by Charles T. Jackson andDisproving the Claim of W.T.G. Morton.” This pamphlet, basedmainly on evidence collected by a Congressional committee, holdsthat Jackson discovered in the winter of 1841-1842 how toproduce anaesthesia by means of sulphuric ether, that hecommunicated his discovery to Morton in 1846, and that Mortonfirst applied ether in a surgical case at the MassachusettsGeneral Hospital in the same year. Jackson and his family werebitter over the failure of Congress to give Jackson properrecognition, and Emerson was convinced that his brother in lawhad suffered a great injustice.

This is strange, for ether had been known as a narcotic substance since 1275, and had been in use by physicians since at least 1794, and the first operation using ether as an anaesthetic (of which we are presently aware) would occur in Georgia in March 1842, and the fact was that “ether parties,” in which the anaesthesia effects of ether were recreationally explored, had been a fixture of the college scene in that era. This had been going literally on for some time. Even Thoreau seems to have taken part in one such event while at Harvard College — and he had graduated in 1837. It sounds to me as common then as college students getting together to blow a joint, today. By the winter of 1841/1842 I’m sure that literally thousands of college men had learned how to “produce anesthesia by means of sulphuric ether,” by mutual experimentation at such college parties and events. But, continuing with Ellen Emerson’s biography of Lydian Emerson, concerns the claims:

When S.F.B. Morse secured a telegraph patent in 1840, CharlesJackson claimed to have explained the method of applyingelectricity to telegraphic use to Morse on board the ship Sullyin 1832. William T. Davis claims that ship’s mate, Blithen,verified Jackson’s claim to him in 1846.

Nothing could ever be based upon such a claim, either then or now, especially since there were several hundred people who actually were building electric apparatuses and conducting experiments and field trials before Morse won the day (he would win primarily by means of his political connections, which got him institutional support others were unable to obtain, for lengths of wire, rights of way, and quantities of electricity).5

5. It is easier to grasp the nature of this syndrome in retrospect, for we now have a chronological record of the repetitions of this problem in the life of Jackson, and we can see how each of the repetitions was marked with the pattern of 1.) an announcement by someone else, 2.) immediate assertion of a claim to prior discovery, 3.) a markedly bitter struggle, and 4.) denial of Jackson’s claim by all but himself and his small band of sympathizers/relatives. This syndrome occurred in regard to the discovery of guncotton by Christian Friedrich Schönbein, in regard to the invention of the telegraph by Samuel F.B. Morse, in regard to the discovery of the digestive action of the stomach by William Beaumont, and in regard to the discovery that the copper deposits of Lake Superior could be economically mined by Douglass Houghton. In each case –with the marked exception of the mineability of the copper near Lake Superior– the historical record has gone against Jackson (in regard to the copper, Jackson had indeed in 1849 made the initial such assertion — but in such cases we simply do not ever award merit to some individual who merely notes a possibility while neglecting to mount any successful agenda of exploitation).






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William Thomas Green Morton left the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery without graduating to study dentistry in Hartford, Connecticut under Dr. Horace Wells, with whom he would share a brief partnership.

Death of Thomas De Quincey’s son Lieutenant Horace De Quincey in China at the age of 22.

By this point England’s opium trade in China had reached 40,000 chests annually. The government of China, attempting to interdict opium traffic and thus prevent its citizens from debilitating themselves by “chasing the dragon” as so desired by foreign enemies, seized and destroyed bales of opium belonging to English merchants. Naughty naughty!

When the dust of the 1st Opium War had settled later on in this year, China had been re-opened to the English opium traffic by the initial one of the “Unequal Treaties” into which it was coerced by overwhelmingly powerful and insolent and paternalistic Westerners. Trade restrictions were removed. In a decade the trade volume would double. Having been chastened by the lion and unicorn of Great Britain, the Central Kingdom would be obliged for many years to “chase the dragon” for the greater profit of Englishmen (who would eventually be mailing postcards home to their loved ones from Hong Kong, postcards showing picturesque scenes of the indescribable debasement of Orientals, obtained from filthy opium dens).

1842






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Well, but drugs aren’t all bad. For instance, in this year C.W. Long of Jefferson, Georgia first used nitrous oxide gas as an anesthetic during an operation. Some have attested this to be the first such use of any anesthetic during an operation. The effect of shock upon patients had been such a great killer that the rule of thumb of the time was, that if a surgeon took longer than 15 minutes to complete an operation the patient was gonna die. Therefore surgeons needed not only the eye of an eagle, the hand of a lady, and the heart of a lion (the saying in those days), but also the speed of a weasel: it had been said in praise of a particularly swift British sawbones, Dr. Astley Cooper, that:

A little more opium, Mr. China?

For operating with alacrity, and well at the same time,I have never known his equal.

DENTISTRY






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February: If you were for some reason to pay a visit to the headquarters of the Society of Mayflower Descendants on North Street in Plymouth, Massachusetts, you would be able to inspect there a rocking chair coated in dark lacquer with, mounted on its back, a brass plaque that announces:

In This Chair Dr. Charles Jackson Discovered Etherization, February 1842

March 30: Dr. Crawford Williamson Long of rural Jefferson, Georgia put James M. Venable under with ether in order to excise a tumor from his neck. Apparently Dr. Long had been using such anesthesia for minor surgery since the previous year, having learned about ether during “ether frolics” in med school at the U of Pennsylvania. (Long would not publish about this until 1848, when he would put a report of his practice in The Southern Medical and Surgical Journal.)

Jules Michelet wrote in his journal:

One could, moreover, maintain that we are the elders. Who isolder, Virgil or Homer? In the latter, one senses a sap ofeternal youth; in Virgil, on the contrary, the world is old andmelancholy. New ideas constantly come to rejuvenate the world;each day it is more powerful, more complex, and more varied. Yetantiquity is simpler, and it contains ideas in a concentratedstate, or the state of an elixir.

In Rochester, New York, Dr. J.B. Beers began the use of gold teeth in dentistry.

William Thomas Green Morton got married with Elizabeth Whitman of Farmington, Connecticut (a niece of former Congressman Lemuel Whitman), promising her parents that he would undertake the study of medicine rather than remain a dentist.

1843






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Fall: William Thomas Green Morton entered Harvard Medical School, where at the chemistry lectures of Dr. Charles T. Jackson he would learn of the anesthetic properties of sulfuric ether (the med student would leave without graduating).

As the Thoreaus built their “Texas” House on Texas Street (now Belknap Street), it was Henry Thoreau who dug the cellar hole. This was to be the family home and boardinghouse “to August 29th, 1850” (this structure would be damaged beyond repair by fire and the devastating hurricane of 1938).

“Is a house but a gall on the face of the earth, a nidus which some insect has provided for its young?”

–JOURNAL May 1, 1857

This structure, and the shanty Thoreau would build on Walden Pond in the spring, summer, and fall of 1845: were they traditionally framed or were they “balloon” framed?

1844

Americans’ technologies of building in the first decades of the19th Century had evolved gradually from those of their 17th- and18th-Century ancestors and for the most part would have beenrecognizable to earlier generations of housewrights. But aradically new way of putting buildings together appeared in theearly 1830s, probably first developed by carpenters struggling tokeep pace with the rapid growth of the settlement of Chicago onthe tree-poor Illinois prairie. “Balloon framing” replaced themassive timber frame with a structural skin of numerous light,weight-bearing members, later standardized as two-by-fours, whichwere simply nailed together, not intricately joined. Carpenterscould put up a balloon frame more quickly and could use muchsmaller-dimensioned lumber. Balloon framing was adopted first bybuilders in fast-growing Western cities and commercial towns, forwhom speed and economizing on materials were highly important.It was slower to arrive in older, Eastern cities and took evenlonger to arrive in the countryside, where it did not really beginto replace the old ways until after 1860. Eventually rapidconstruction with lighter lumber triumphed almost everywhere;traditional timber framing and log construction had almostdisappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.

Larkin, Jack. THE RESHAPING OF EVERYDAY LIFE 1790-1840. NY: Harper & Row, 1988, page 109.






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On Princes Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Scott Monument stood complete in all its magnificence.

The enormously expensive monument includes 64 statues mostly of characters from Sir Walter Scott’s novels, but with some figures from Scottish history. One of the statues on the upper tier of the northeast buttress, next to Robert the Bruce, purports to represent Robert Paterson, called “Old Mortality.”

December 10, Monday: Nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas,” had been a great favorite at parties, but at this point it was beginning to find favor as well in dentistry. Ether would be added in 1846, over religious protests, and chloroform (invented in 1831) would follow in 1848. Here is an illustration of the use of nitrous oxide on the stage and as a theatre party, in an advertisement that appeared in the Hartford Courant:

REPLICA OF CABIN






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A grand exhibition of the effects produced by inhaling NitrousOxide, Exhilerating, or Laughing Gas! will be given at Union






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Hall this evening, December 10, 1844.Forty gallons of gas will be prepared and administered to allin the audience who desire to inhale it.Twelve Young Men have volunteered to inhale the gas to commencethe entertainment.Eight strong men are engaged to occupy the front seats to protectthose under the influence of the gas from injuring themselvesor others. This course is adopted that no apprehension of dangermay be entertained. Probably no one will attempt to fight....The gas will be administered only to gentlemen of the firstrespectability. The object is to make the entertainment in everyrespect a genteel affair.

The purveyor of this inhalation experience was Gardner Quincy Colton. Horace Wells and a friend attended the performance, and while “under the influence,” Wells’s friend injured himself but experienced no pain. The next morning Wells would obtain a bag of the gas from Colton and have a colleague painlessly extract one of his teeth.

DENTISTRY






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December 11, Tuesday: Dr. Horace Wells, a 29-year-old dentist of Hartford, Connecticut who had been trained in

Boston, inhaled nitrous oxide “laughing” gas administered by Gardner [Garner?] Quincy Colton, and had an associate, his friend and former pupil Dr. John Riggs (later of “Riggs’ Disease” fame) extract an aching 3rd molar. After the effects had worn off he exclaimed, “I did not feel so much as the prick of a pin. A new era in tooth-pulling has come!”6 This was the first operation performed under nitrous oxide inhalation anesthesia. Wells would focus his career on the promotion of nitrous oxide anesthesia and would attempt without much success to promote his technique in the Boston medical community. He would carry on his work in many of the capitals of Europe. He used the influence of William T.G. Morton, with whom he had had a shared dental practice in 1843, and whom he had tutored in dentistry.

6. Later in his life, Dr. Wells would become a recreational user of chloroform, and he liked to sniff some and then go out and find himself a prostitute, and throw acid at her. His experiments on himself and his fun activities would, on January 24, 1848, bring about his death by suicide in jail. He is commemorated by a bronze statue in the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford CT (but I don’t know that any of the prostitutes he threw acid upon while under the influence have been similarly commemorated, in Hartford CT or elsewhere, or if there is a bronze plaque on the wall of the cell in which he killed himself).

DENTISTRY






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January 31, Thursday: Dr. Horace Wells lectured before Dr. John Collins Warren’s class of Harvard Medical students

at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on “The Use of Nitrous Oxide for the Prevention of Pain,”

1845






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and demonstrated “laughing gas” anesthesia for extractions. Dr. William Thomas Green Morton was present.

Afterward Morton consulted with his former chemistry teacher at the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Charles T. Jackson, and used sulfuric ether on September 30 and October 16, 1846.

At the first surgery under ether, at Massachusetts General Hospital in this year, when the patient groaned, the operation was deemed by hostile medicos to have been a failure at avoiding “pain ordained by God.”

DENTISTRY






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(Later this patient would confess that actually he had felt nothing.)

Thoreau would have all his teeth pulled under anesthesia, and Waldo Emerson would first espouse the cause of this in-law who would lay claim to have himself originated the use of anesthesia and then eventually would






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himself die under anesthesia.

Well, there is really a question whether Mark Twain was correct, from a medical perspective. The introduction of anesthesia during operations did eventually reduce the general mortality from the point at which 29 people of 100 who were operated on died during or soon after the operation, many due to the pain and the sight of one of their limbs being sawed off (general post-traumatic shock), did reduce it to the point at which only 23 of 100 who were operated on would die immediately or soon. The next major advance in surgery, however, came when surgeons learned to wash their hands before as well as after an operation, and wash their saws between patients, and not operate in room filled with mummies or other dead bodies, etc. (that is, with the discovery by Lister of aseptic surgery). We may notice that the dentist Morton died poor, primarily because his colleagues

Viewed in some lights, the discovery of anesthesia wasmore signally charged with beneficent consequences tomankind than any other event in the profane history ofthe world.

–Mark Twain.






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bitterly opposed these attempts to diminish the mere pain experienced by their patients.


DENTISTRY






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Caroline Lee Hentz’s AUNT PATTY’S SCRAP-BAG.

Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History:

The use of nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas,” in dentistry began to be supplemented by the use of ether, over religious protests, and chloroform (invented in 1831) would follow in 1848.

When the Monthyon Prize of 5,000 francs was jointly awarded by the French Academy of Medicine to Charles T. Jackson of the Boston Society of Natural History and William Thomas Green Morton, Dr. Morton refused his share, because, he said, the discovery had been his and his alone and therefore the entire prize belonged to him and him alone!

1846

PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1846

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/46/1846_BSNHproceedings.pdf






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DID DRUG USE AT HARVARD START ANESTHESIOLOGY?

The three main actors in the story of the discovery of anesthesia, William Thomas Green Morton, Charles T. Jackson and Horace Wells, three Harvard College dental students who turned on with nitrous oxide in the 1840s, would fall to fighting over who should get the credit, with disastrous results. Wells started it all by doing experiments with nitrous oxide but failed to follow through. Jackson put Morton onto ether but it was Morton who thought out and performed the research, took the risks, and developed a safe and reliable method. In support of Morton’s claim mention is made of a Boston chemical supplier named Theodore Metcalf, and a maker of surgical instruments named Wightman. Only after the risks had been taken and the discovery accepted by the medical establishment did Jackson try to cash in, claiming that he had been the head and Morton merely the hands:

• Jackson, 1805-1880 — chemistry professor at Harvard (Semmelweis also died in an insane asylum, of puerperal fever, with Lister performing the 1st operation using antisepsis as well as anesthesia on the following day)

• Wells, 1817-1848• Morton, 1819-1868 — this Boston dentist and former student of Jackson’s suffered a nervous

breakdown and spent the rest of his life battling poverty; four times he was voted a pension by Congress, but four times it reversed itself when Jackson and others pressed their claims.

We have an extant letter from one of Thoreau’s Harvard chums, which talks about students turning on with nitrous oxide back in the late 1830s. So, in the Kouroo database, we have a link between Thoreau and Jackson, and then a link between Emerson and Jackson in that his 2d wife Lydian was a blood relative of Jackson and in that Emerson was espousing Jackson’s claim to have originated anesthesiology. And, in the database, we have a link between Thoreau and painless dentistry in that he had all his teeth pulled at once under anesthesia and commented afterward about how his soul had been simply dissolved for a time in a chemical (!) — but up to this point we have not had a link between Thoreau’s absolute rejection of all recreational drug use, and the early drug scene at Harvard. What is being pointed at here could be extremely new and relevant, a wonderful tie-in if it might be established.

Morton and Jackson together sought to take out a government patent on their “Letheon.” When it became clear that in order to secure such a patent they would need not only to perform a surgical operation using the compound but also to reveal to all the secret nature of the compound to prove it wasn’t a quack remedy, Morton was willing to do so in full awareness that he was thereby kissing his dreams of wealth good-bye. Jackson however became furious at the though of such wealth-destroying disclosure and the animosity between these two men dates from that point forward. The Thoreau family faced the same problem in that era in which America essentially was a pirate nation, stealing patents, in regard to its processing of graphite. For them to have attempted to patent the process they were using in the hope of obtaining money for the leasing of this technology would have required them to reveal their processing secrets to the government, which in effect would have been for them to have given their trade secrets away for free. Nowadays we don’t think of the USA as a pirate nation, so when Chinese factories copy our music CDs and our computer programs and our medical textbooks and sells them on the world market for ridiculously low prices and pays no royalties, we are exceedingly indignant. We have forgotten that that was precisely the manner in which we ourselves once operated.

The defense in the Webster murder trial relied on expert witnesses who by the sheerest of coincidences or for some underlying unstated reason happened to be also supporters of the one side of the anesthesia controversy, while the prosecution in the trial relied on expert witnesses who by the sheerest of coincidences or for some underlying unstated reason happened to be also supporters of the other side of that controversy.






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September 30, Wednesday: At 9PM in his Boston dental office, a tooth was successfully extracted by dentist William Thomas Green Morton while his patient the city merchant Eben H. Frost was under sulfuric ether.







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Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune about her having gotten lost in the Ben Lomond terrain — and after her death this would appear in AT HOME AND ABROAD:

Birmingham, September 30th, 1846.I was obliged to stop writing at Edinburgh before the betterhalf of my tale was told, and must now begin there again, tospeak of an excursion into the Highlands, which occupied abouta fortnight.We left Edinburgh, by coach for Perth, and arrived there aboutthree in the afternoon. I have reason to be very glad that Ivisit this island before the reign of the stage-coach is quiteover. I have been constantly on the top of the coach, even oneday of drenching rain, and enjoy it highly. Nothing can be moreinspiring than this swift, steady progress over such smoothroads, and placed so high as to overlook the country freely,with the lively flourish of the horn preluding every pause.Travelling by railroad is, in my opinion, the most stupidprocess on earth; it is sleep without the refreshment of sleep,






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for the noise of the train makes it impossible either to read,talk, or sleep to advantage. But here the advantages areimmense; you can fly through this dull trance from one beautifulplace to another, and stay at each during the time that wouldotherwise be spent on the road. Already the artists, who areobliged to find their home in London, rejoice that all Englandis thrown open to them for sketching-ground, since they can nowavail themselves of a day’s leisure at a great distance, andwith choice of position, whereas formerly they were obliged toconfine themselves to a few “green, and bowery” spots in theneighborhood of the metropolis. But while in the car, it is tome that worst of purgatories, the purgatory of dulness.Well, on the coach we went to Perth, and passed through Kinross,and saw Loch Leven, and the island where Queen Mary passed thosesorrowful months, before her romantic escape under care of theDouglas. As this unhappy, lovely woman stands for a type inhistory, death, time, and distance do not destroy her attractivepower. Like Cleopatra, she has still her adorers; nay, some areborn to her in each new generation of men. Lately she has forher chevalier the Russian Prince Labanoff, who has spentfourteen years in studying upon all that related to her, andthinks now that he can make out a story and a picture about themysteries of her short reign, which shall satisfy the desire ofher lovers to find her as pure and just as she was charming. Ihave only seen of his array of evidence so much, as may be foundin the pages of Chambers’s Journal, but that much does notdisturb the original view I have taken of the case; which is,that from a princess educated under the Medici and Guiseinfluence, engaged in the meshes of secret intrigue to favor theRoman Catholic faith, her tacit acquiescence, at least, in themurder of Darnley, after all his injurious conduct toward her,was just what was to be expected. From a poor, beautiful youngwoman, longing to enjoy life, exposed both by her position andher natural fascinations to the utmost bewilderment of flattery,whether prompted by interest or passion, her other acts of follyare most natural, and let all who feel inclined harshly tocondemn her remember to“Gently scan your brother man, Still gentler sister woman.”Surely, in all the stern pages of life’s account-book there isnone on which a more terrible price is exacted for every preciousendowment. Her rank and reign only made her powerless to do good,and exposed her to danger; her talents only served to irritateher foes and disappoint her friends. This most charming of womenwas the destruction of her lovers: married three times, she hadnever any happiness as a wife, but in both the connections ofher choice found that she had either never possessed or couldnot retain, even for a few weeks, the love of the men she hadchosen, so that Darnley was willing to risk her life and thatof his unborn child to wreak his wrath upon Rizzio, and after afew weeks with Bothwell she was heard “calling aloud for a knifeto kill herself with.” A mother twice, and of a son and daughter,both the children were brought forth in loneliness and sorrow,and separated from her early, her son educated to hate her, herdaughter at once immured in a convent. Add the eighteen yearsof her imprisonment, and the fact that this foolish, prodigalworld, when there was in it one woman fitted by her grace andloveliness to charm all eyes and enliven all fancies, suffered






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her to be shut up to water with her tears her dull embroideryduring all the full rose-blossom of her life, and you will hardlyget beyond this story for a tragedy, not noble, but pallid andforlorn.Such were the bootless, best thoughts I had while looking at thedull blood-stain and blocked-up secret stair of Holyrood, at theruins of Loch Leven castle, and afterward at Abbotsford, wherethe picture of Queen Mary’s head, as it lay on the pillow whensevered from the block, hung opposite to a fine caricature of“Queen Elizabeth dancing high and disposedly.” In this last theface is like a mask, so frightful is the expression of coldcraft, irritated, vanity, and the malice of a lonely breast incontrast with the attitude and elaborate frippery of the dress.The ambassador looks on dismayed; the little page can scarcelycontrol the laughter which swells his boyish cheeks. Such canwin the world which, better hearts (and such Mary’s was, evenif it had a large black speck in it) are most like to lose.That was a most lovely day on which we entered Perth, and sawin full sunshine its beautiful meadows, among them the North-Inch, the famous battle-ground commemorated in “The Fair Maidof Perth,” adorned with graceful trees like those of the NewEngland country towns. In the afternoon we visited the modernKinfauns, the stately home of Lord Grey. The drive to it is mostbeautiful, on the one side the Park, with noble heights thatskirt it, on the other through a belt of trees was seen the riverand the sweep of that fair and cultivated country. The house isa fine one, and furnished with taste, the library large, andsome good works in marble. Among the family pictures onearrested my attention, — the face of a girl full of the mostpathetic sensibility, and with no restraint of convention uponits ardent, gentle expression. She died young.Returning, we were saddened, as almost always on leaving anysuch place, by seeing such swarms of dirty women and dirtierchildren at the doors of the cottages almost close by the gateof the avenue. To the horrors and sorrows of the streets in suchplaces as Liverpool, Glasgow, and, above all, London, one hasto grow insensible or die daily; but here in the sweet, fresh,green country, where there seems to be room for everybody, itis impossible to forget the frightful inequalities between thelot of man and man, or believe that God can smile upon a stateof things such as we find existent here. Can any man who hasseen these things dare blame the Associationists for theirattempt to find prevention against such misery and wickednessin our land? Rather will not every man of tolerable intelligenceand good feeling commend, say rather revere, every earnestattempt in that direction, nor dare interfere with any, unlesshe has a better to offer in its place?Next morning we passed on to Crieff, in whose neighborhood wevisited Drummond Castle, the abode, or rather one of the abodes,of Lord Willoughby D’Eresby. It has a noble park, through whichyou pass by an avenue of two miles long. The old keep is stillascended to get the fine view of the surrounding country; andduring Queen Victoria’s visit, her Guards were quartered there.But what took my fancy most was the old-fashioned garden, fullof old shrubs and new flowers, with its formal parterres in theshape of the family arms, and its clipped yew and box trees. Itwas fresh from a shower, and now glittering and fragrant in






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bright sunshine.This afternoon we pursued our way, passing through theplantations of Ochtertyre, a far more charming place to my tastethan Drummond Castle, freer and more various in its features.Five or six of these fine places lie in the neighborhood ofCrieff, and the traveller may give two or three days to visitingthem with a rich reward of delight. But we were pressing on tobe with the lakes and mountains rather, and that night broughtus to St. Fillan’s, where we saw the moon shining on Loch Earn.All this region, and that of Loch Katrine and the Trosachs, whichwe reached next day, Scott has described exactly in “The Ladyof the Lake”; nor is it possible to appreciate that poem, withoutgoing thither, neither to describe the scene better than he hasdone after you have seen it. I was somewhat disappointed in thepass of the Trosachs itself; it is very grand, but the grandpart lasts so little while. The opening view of Loch Katrine,however, surpassed, expectation. It was late in the afternoonwhen we launched our little boat there for Ellen’s isle.The boatmen recite, though not con molto espressione, the parts of thepoem which describe these localities. Observing that they spokeof the personages, too, with the same air of confidence, we askedif they were sure that all this really happened. They replied,“Certainly; it had been told from father to son through so manygenerations.” Such is the power of genius to interpolate whatit will into the regular log-book of Time’s voyage.Leaving Loch Katrine the following day, we entered Rob Roy’scountry, and saw on the way the house where Helen MacGregor wasborn, and Rob Roy’s sword, which is shown in a house by the way-side.We came in a row-boat up Loch Katrine, though both on that andLoch Lomond you may go in a hateful little steamer with asqueaking fiddle to play Rob Roy MacGregor O. I walked almostall the way through the pass from Loch Katrine to Loch Lomond;it was a distance of six miles; but you feel as if you couldwalk sixty in that pure, exhilarating air. At Inversnaid we tookboat again to go down Loch Lomond to the little inn ofRowardennan, from which the ascent is made of Ben Lomond, thegreatest elevation in these parts. The boatmen are fine,athletic men; one of those with us this evening, a handsome youngman of two or three and twenty, sang to us some Gaelic songs.The first, a very wild and plaintive air, was the expostulationof a girl whose lover has deserted her and married another. Itseems he is ashamed, and will not even look at her when theymeet upon the road. She implores him, if he has not forgottenall that scene of bygone love, at least to lift up his eyes andgive her one friendly glance. The sad crooning burden of thestanzas in which she repeats this request was very touching.When the boatman had finished, he hung his head and seemedashamed of feeling the song too much; then, when we asked foranother, he said he would sing another about a girl that washappy. This one was in three parts. First, a tuneful addressfrom a maiden to her absent lover; second, his reply, assuringher of his fidelity and tenderness; third, a strain whichexpresses their joy when reunited. I thought this boatman hadsympathies which would prevent his tormenting any poor women,and perhaps make some one happy, and this was a pleasant thought,since probably in the Highlands, as elsewhere,






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“Maidens lend an ear too oft To the careless wooer; Maidens’hearts are always soft; Would that men’s were truer!”I don’t know that I quote the words correctly, but that is thesum and substance of a masculine report on these matters.The first day at Rowardennan not being propitious for ascendingthe mountain, we went down the lake to sup, and got very tiredin various ways, so that we rose very late next morning. Theirwe found a day of ten thousand for our purpose; but unhappily alarge party had come with the sun and engaged all the horses,so that, if we went, it must be on foot. This was something ofan enterprise for me, as the ascent is four miles, and towardthe summit quite fatiguing; however, in the pride of newlygained health and strength, I was ready, and set forth with Mr.S. alone. We took no guide, — and the people of the house didnot advise it, as they ought. They told us afterward they thoughtthe day was so clear that there was no probability of danger,and they were afraid of seeming mercenary about it. It was,however, wrong, as they knew what we did not, that even theshepherds, if a mist comes on, can be lost in these hills; thata party of gentlemen were so a few weeks before, and only byaccident found their way to a house on the other side; and thata child which had been lost was not found for five days, longafter its death. We, however, nothing doubting, set forth,ascending slowly, and often stopping to enjoy the points ofview, which are many, for Ben Lomond consists of a congeries ofhills, above which towers the true Ben, or highest peak, as thehead of a many-limbed body.On reaching the peak, the night was one of beauty and grandeursuch as imagination never painted. You see around you no plainground, but on every side constellations or groups of hillsexquisitely dressed in the soft purple of the heather, amidwhich gleam the lakes, like eyes that tell the secrets of theearth and drink in those of the heavens. Peak beyond peak caughtfrom the shifting light all the colors of the prism, and on thefarthest, angel companies seemed hovering in their gloriouswhite robes.Words are idle on such subjects; what can I say, but that it wasa noble vision, that satisfied the eye and stirred theimagination in all its secret pulses? Had that been, asafterward seemed likely, the last act of my life, there couldnot have been a finer decoration painted on the curtain whichwas to drop upon it.About four o’clock we began our descent. Near the summit thetraces of the path are not distinct, and I said to Mr. S., aftera while, that we had lost it. He said, he thought that was ofno consequence, we could find oar way down. I thought howeverit was, as the ground was full of springs that were bridged overin the pathway. He accordingly went to look for it, and I stoodstill because so tired that I did not like to waste any labor.Soon he called to me that he had found it, and I followed in thedirection where he seemed to be. But I mistook, overshot it, andsaw him no more. In about ten minutes I became alarmed, andcalled him many times. It seems he on his side did the same, butthe brow of some hill was between us, and we neither saw norheard one another.I then thought I would make the best of my way down, and I shouldfind him upon my arrival. But in doing so I found the justice






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of my apprehension about the springs, as, so soon as I got tothe foot of the hills, I would sink up to my knees in bog, andhave to go up the hills again, seeking better crossing-places.Thus I lost much time; nevertheless, in the twilight I saw atlast the lake and the inn of Rowardennan on its shore.Between me and it lay direct a high heathery hill, which Iafterward found is called “The Tongue,” because hemmed in onthree sides by a watercourse. It looked as if, could I only getto the bottom of that, I should be on comparatively level ground.I then attempted to descend in the watercourse, but, findingthat impracticable, climbed on the hill again and let myselfdown by the heather, for it was very steep and full of deepholes. With great fatigue I got to the bottom, but when aboutto cross the watercourse there, it looked so deep in the dimtwilight that I felt afraid. I got down as far as I could by theroot of a tree, and threw down a stone; it sounded very hollow,and made me afraid to jump. The shepherds told me afterward, ifI had, I should probably have killed myself, it was so deep andthe bed of the torrent full of sharp stones.I then tried to ascend the hill again, for there was no otherway to get off it, but soon sunk down utterly exhausted. Whenable to get up again and look about me, it was completely dark.I saw far below me a light, that looked about as big as a pin’shead, which I knew to be from the inn at Rowardennan, but heardno sound except the rush of the waterfall, and the sighing ofthe night-wind.For the first few minutes after I perceived I had got to mynight’s lodging, such as it was, the prospect seemed appalling.I was very lightly clad, — my feet and dress were very wet, — Ihad only a little shawl to throw round me, and a cold autumnwind had already come, and the night-mist was to fall on me, allfevered and exhausted as I was. I thought I should not livethrough the night, or, if I did, live always a miserable invalid.There was no chance to keep myself warm by walking, for, now itwas dark, it would be too dangerous to stir.My only chance, however, lay in motion, and my only help inmyself, and so convinced was I of this, that I did keep in motionthe whole of that long night, imprisoned as I was on such alittle perch of that great mountain. How long it seemed undersuch circumstances only those can guess who may have beensimilarly circumstanced. The mental experience of the time, mostprecious and profound, — for it was indeed a season lonely,dangerous, and helpless enough for the birth of thoughts beyondwhat the common sunlight will ever call to being, — may be toldin another place and time.For about two hours I saw the stars, and very cheery andcompanionable they looked; but then the mist fell, and I sawnothing more, except such apparitions as visited Ossian on thehill-side when he went out by night and struck the bosky shieldand called to him the spirits of the heroes and the white-armedmaids with their blue eyes of grief. To me, too, came thosevisionary shapes; floating slowly and gracefully, their whiterobes would unfurl from the great body of mist in which they hadbeen engaged, and come upon me with a kiss pervasively cold asthat of death. What they might have told me, who knows, if I hadbut resigned myself more passively to that cold, spirit-likebreathing!






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At last the moon rose. I could not see her, but the silver lightfilled the mist. Then I knew it was two o’clock, and that, havingweathered out so much of the night, I might the rest; and thehours hardly seemed long to me more.It may give an idea of the extent of the mountain to say that,though I called every now and then with all my force, in caseby chance some aid might be near, and though no less than twentymen with their dogs were looking for me, I never heard a soundexcept the rush of the waterfall and the sighing of the night-wind, and once or twice the startling of the grouse in theheather. It was sublime indeed, — a never-to-be-forgottenpresentation of stern, serene realities.At last came the signs of day, the gradual clearing and breakingup; some faint sounds, from I know not what. The little flies,too, arose from their bed amid the purple heather, and bit me;truly they were very welcome to do so. But what was mydisappointment to find the mist so thick, that I could seeneither lake nor inn, nor anything to guide me. I had to go byguess, and, as it happened, my Yankee method served me well. Iascended the hill, crossed the torrent in the waterfall, firstdrinking some of the water, which was as good at that time asambrosia. I crossed in that place because the waterfall madesteps, as it were, to the next hill; to be sure they were coveredwith water, but I was already entirely wet with the mist, sothat it did not matter. I then kept on scrambling, as ithappened, in the right direction, till, about seven, some of theshepherds found me. The moment they came, all my feverishstrength departed, though, if unaided, I dare say it would havekept me up during the day; and they carried me home, where myarrival relieved my friends of distress far greater than I hadundergone, for I had had my grand solitude, my Ossianic visions,and the pleasure of sustaining myself while they had only doubtamounting to anguish and a fruitless search through the night.Entirely contrary to my expectations, I only suffered for thisa few days, and was able to take a parting look at my prison,as I went down the lake, with feelings of complacency. It was amajestic-looking hill, that Tongue, with the deep ravines oneither side, and the richest robe of heather I have seenanywhere.Mr. S. gave all the men who were looking for me a dinner in thebarn, and he and Mrs. S. ministered to them, and they talked ofBurns, really the national writer, and known by them,apparently, as none other is, and of hair-breadth escapes byflood and fell. Afterwards they were all brought up to see me,and it was pleasing indeed to observe the good breeding and good,feeling with which they deported themselves on the occasion.Indeed, this adventure created quite an intimate feeling betweenus and the people there. I had been much pleased, with thembefore, in attending one of their dances, on account of thegenuine independence and politeness of their conduct. They werewilling and pleased to dance their Highland flings andstrathspeys for our amusement, and did it as naturally and asfreely as they would have offered the stranger the best chair.All the rest must wait a while. I cannot economize time to keepup my record in any proportion with what happens, nor can I getout of Scotland on this page, as I had intended, without utterly






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slighting many gifts and graces.7

October 1, Thursday: The Boston Daily Journal told an eager world that on the previous evening a Mr. Frost’s ulcerated tooth was extracted by dentist William Thomas Green Morton without any pain, because sulfuric ether had been administered before the extraction.

7. Walt Whitman clipped from the newspaper Margaret’s account of getting lost on Ben Lomond.

ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

Dentist Morton got the credit for anesthesiaalthough Emerson lobbied for his brother-in-law

Charles T. Jackson to have this credit


http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/46/SEP/30sep1846_MargaretFullerREPORT.pdf






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October 16, Friday: This is the day that would come to be known as “Ether Day.” At approximately 10:15AM in the Bulfinch building at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Junior Surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow had arranged for a demonstration of anesthesia with Senior Surgeon John Collins Warren. Joseph M. Wightman and Nathan B. Chamberlain had blown a glass reservoir with which to administer the sulfuric ether, using pass-over vaporization, and then changes had been made in the device by the dentist William Thomas Green Morton and Dr. Augustus Addison Gould. The patient was 20 year-old charity patient, Edward Gilbert Abbott, a printer and editor who needed to have a congenital vascular malformation removed from his neck.

What was underway here would reduce the deaths from operative and post-surgery shock from 29 patients in 100 to 24 patients in 100. The 1944 film “The Great Moment” is worth seeing.8

8. Of course, surgeons could have saved far more lives if they had gotten those mummies out of the operating room, and washed their hands before operating as well as afterwards, and if, between amputations, they had cleaned their saws.

“Gentlemen, this is no humbug.”






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Nathaniel Peabody Rogers died at a mere 52 years of age shortly after his return home to New Hampshire from Lynn MA. As he lay dying, he asked that Judson Hutchinson of the Hutchinson Family Singers come to the home and sing for him. Judson rushed there but was, apparently, too late.

October 17, Saturday: A 2nd operation using sulfuric ether.







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October 27, Tuesday: R.H. Eddy, son of a patent commissioner and a friend of Charles T. Jackson, persuaded him to add his name to an ether patent.

In Brooklyn, a city renowned for its compassion –rather than pull the usual sack over a condemned person’s head before applying the hangman’s noose –officials experimented by first rendering the condemned unconscious through the use of sulfuric ether.9

1847

9. Almost a century later, in our nation’s first experiment with cyanide gas for execution, we would attempt to administer the gas in the condemned man’s cell as he slept — and this attempt would fail.

HANGING






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WOMEN HANGED IN ENGLAND DURING 1847

In his ACCOUNT OF A NEW ANESTHETIC AGENT, obstetrician Sir James Young Simpson (1811-1870) argued that chloroform, a substance invented by the chemists Samuel Guthrie and Justus von Liebig in 1831, was superior to both nitrous oxide and ether as an anesthetic. Simpson had begun to use it as an anesthetic during childbirth.10

At the Boston Lying-In Hospital, Ellery Channing’s father, Doctor Walter Channing, began to experiment with the use of sulfuric ether as an anesthetic in obstetrics.

Fanny Appleton Longfellow was the first to experiment with use of this anesthetic to cope with the pain of childbirth.

Her experimental baby would live only a year. Presumably this wasn’t due to the dangerous experimental childbirth technique which it had initially needed to survive, but also — one cannot help but notice that today we have learned better than to administer ether to cope with the pain of childbirth, just as we have learned better than to administer thalidomide to ease the trauma of pregnancy.

Date Name Age Place of execution Crime

17/04 Catherine Foster 18 Bury St Edmunds Murder of husband

30/07 Mary Ann Milnera

a. She managed to hang herself in the waiting cell for the condemned, and subsequentto this a more careful watch would be instituted.

Lincoln Castle Murder

10. Note that our experience with this chemical has been such, that we no longer employ it for anesthesia during childbirth.

I feel proud to be the pioneer to less suffering forpoor weak womankind.






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March: In Scientific American there appeared an ingenious proposal by “an eminent English dentist,” to wit, that since it was a property of India rubber that it could by the application of fire be made most smooth and viscous (a process of vulcanization??) it might be utilized as a filling for hollow teeth, to keep air away from the nerve and thus prevent toothache. The dentist recommended melting a lump of this caoutchouc at the flame of a candle and then while still warm pressing it into the hollow tooth.11

Early Spring: It had been while she was still in Paris, before departing for Napoli, that Margaret Fuller had a tooth out while under the influence of ether. (This was well before Thoreau’s having all his teeth pulled at once, under ether.)

On her way from Paris to Napoli, the English steamer on which the Fuller/Spring party had embarked was rammed and nearly sunk by a coastal ship. In a letter to Emerson she would comment that she had “only just escaped being drowned.”

Spring: US Army doctors in Veracruz, Mexico began to use sulfuric ether on their patients, but discontinued this experiment by the summer because of a fear that the chemical would “poison the blood and depress the nervous system” or because of a feeling that to avoid pain was not manly, not soldierly. Robert E. Lee commented:

11. “Let’s establish a code for communication, Doc. If you hurt me I’ll bite off your finger.”

TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

I think a little lead, properly taken, is good for a man.

WAR ON MEXICO






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At this point real surphuric ether was first distilled, by Wetherill.12

January 21, Saturday: While under the influence of recreational chloroform, the failed dentist Horace Wells threw acid on the clothing of a prostitute.

January 23, Monday: Having purchased tickets to an anniversary celebration of Franklin’s birthday at the Irving House, the two mulattos Frederick Douglass and William Cooper Nell ran into but coped with a colorphobia problem.

1848

12. Basil Valentine had in the 14th Century distilled alcohol with sulfuric acid to produce ether, and in 1681 Kunkel had discovered nitric ether. In 1734 Gay-Lussac had discovered hydratic (incorrectly referred to as “sulphuric”) ether. The preparation of nitric ether, having been forgotten, was rediscovered in 1742 by Navier. Acetic ether had been prepared in 1759 by the Count de Lauragnais. Muriatic ether had been prepared in 1804 by Gehlen. Œnanthic ether had been prepared in 1836 by Liebig and Pelouze.

SUICIDE

THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/90S/95/25feb1895.pdf






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In a cell at Tombs Prison, the drug addict Horace Wells, 33 years of age, slashed his thigh with a razor and bled himself to death.This suicide victim would be the recipient of many honors, both in this country and abroad.

A death mask now hangs in the Boston Medical Library. Although we know that the library acquired this object at some time before 1892, we do not know exactly when, and we do not know who it was who donated it. There is also a memorial window in Center Church of Hartford, Connecticut. The Connecticut State Dental Association celebrated the 150th Anniversary of the discovery of general anesthesia with a testimonial and memorial dinner.

SUICIDE

DENTISTRY






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January 24, Tuesday: Horace Wells, who had committed suicide in jail on the previous day, was awarded an anesthesiology prize by the French Academy of Sciences. Oops.

Sam Houston was sworn in for his first full term as a US Senator.

On this day in California, a bright yellow rock in the bed of a millrace near Coloma was catching the eye of a white carpenter from New Jersey, James Wilson Marshall, as he worked on a sawmill Johann August Sutter was having constructed.

DENTISTRY






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Dr. William Thomas Green Morton had successfully anesthetized a patient prior to surgery he had applied for a patent — but had been denied. The use of ether had become widespread though it was sometimes protested

from the pulpit, on the grounds that life’s pain was something ordained of Providence. Some dentists found that in some cases the use of anesthesia was producing ill effects. Morton would garner precious little recognition or reward during his lifetime. Dr. Horace Wells, also, had suffered from his experimentation with anaesthetics: he had become addicted to chloroform, had thrown acid at prostitutes, had gotten himself into






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a street fight, and on January 24th in this year, had committed suicide in a jail cell.






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January 15, Monday: In downtown Boston –where everything that happens of course happens for the greater glory of God– Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw lectured Washington Goode for an hour and a half on the habits of “intemperance” which he had had, the “ungodly” associates which he had had, the “dens of crime” which he had frequented, etc., informed him that having led such a life there was simply “no hope” that the governor of the state might reduce his sentence. The lecture probably was just what Seaman Goode needed. The judge then consigned him to be hanged by the neck, on May 25, Friday, 1849 (this seems to have been a traditional day upon which to conduct public hangings), until he was dead.13 The opponents of the death penalty, to wit, the Standing Committee of the Massachusetts Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, would have a little more than four months to mobilize public opinion to bring pressure to bear on Governor George Nixon Briggs:

During those four months 24,440 signatures would be collected, petitioning the Governor Briggs to commute Seaman Goode’s sentence, from death by hanging to life in prison without any possibility of parole. For instance, Friend Joseph Ricketson, Friend Daniel Ricketson’s brother who, if I mistake not, was a birthright Quaker in good standing with his Monthly Meeting, reported that:

In addition to the 24,440 signatures mentioned, there was one petition, from Woburn, Massachusetts, bearing a total of nine signatures, which demanded that Governor Briggs remain steadfast in the plan of “exicution.”

An article would appear in the Boston Republican, pointing up the fact that in France the guillotine had been adopted, after consultation with medical men, as the least painful mode of execution, and that since the last hanging in Boston, “the Ether discovery has taken place.”

The question now arises, how shall the hanging be performed herein Boston.... Shall not the convict share also the advantage ofthis benign discovery? He is to be hanged by the neck. Shall notthis be done with the least possible pain? If we follow the spirit of thelaw, there would seem to be no doubt that it must be done withthe least possible pain. And it seems equally clear that it iswithin the discretion of the Sheriff, to permit any form ofalleviating the pain, which is consistent with the one thingimposed upon him by the law; namely, the hanging of Goode, bythe neck, until he is dead. We will not undertake to determine,whether Humanity does not require, that the convict, if hechooses, shall be allowed the benefit of ETHER. We contentourselves with saying that it is clearly within the discretion ofthe Sheriff to permit the pains of the convict to be thusalleviated.

1849

13. In fact, Boston had not hanged anyone for simple homicide since 1826, almost a quarter of a century before, and there was another prisoner, Augustus Dutee, whose sentence to be hanged was being commuted during this period to life in prison — but then, we may presume that Augustus Dutee was a white man, not only because his sentence was commuted but also because the documents do not comment on his race as they would most assuredly have commented had he been anything other than white. In addition to Dutee, seven other murderers were then serving life in Massachusetts prison after having had their sentences to be hanged commuted by the state governor.

Why Sir, even the boys, and they are worth saving, for we havenothing else to make men, and even Governors of, are now saying inour streets, “it is only a nigger.”

I have exerted myself very much for the last month in behalf ofWashington Goode; there were several petitions here and weobtained 746 signatures.






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The petition to commute the sentence of seaman Goode to life in prison without opportunity for parole that was being circulated and sponsored in Concord (either by Anna Maria Whiting, one of the town’s leading abolitionists, or by Caroline Hoar, the wife of Rockwood Hoar) is still in existence and bears, on the men’s side of the sheet, the signature of Henry David Thoreau as second in that column. It bears, on the women’s side of the sheet, the signature of his younger sister, Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, as 5th in that column, followed in immediate succession by the signature of his mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, the signature of his elder sister, Helen Louisa Thoreau, the signature of his aunt Louisa Dunbar, and the signature of his Aunt Jane Thoreau. The signature of his father John Thoreau, Sr., however, appears nowhere on this petition. Why not? Thoreau’s father was 62 years old at this point and still very actively engaged in his home business. Is one to suppose that he, quite alone in his home, wanted Seaman Goode to dance on air?

The full text of that petition, as it came to be circulated in the Prisoner’s Friend, had been as follows:






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WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, solemnly protest against the intendedexecution of Washington Goode, as a crime in which we would underno circumstances participate, which we would prevent, ifpossible, and in the guilt of which we will not, by the seemingassent of silence, suffer ourselves to be implicated.

We believe the execution of this man will involve all who areinstrumental in it in the crime of murder — of the murder in coldblood of a helpless fellow being.

The arguments by which executions are generally defended arewholly wanted here. The prisoner is not one who in spite of goodinstruction and example, for purposes of avarice, revenge orlust, deliberately planned the murder of a fellow-being. Theintended victim of law was a man of misfortune from birth, madeby his social position, and still more by the color which Godgave him, the victim of neglect, of oppression, of prejudice, ofall the evils inflicted upon humanity by man. If in a paroxysmof drunken rage, he killed his opponent, (and this is the utmostalleged against him,) his case comes far short of premeditatedmurder.

But even this fact is extremely doubtful. It is supported onlyby the most suspicious testimony, and such as would not haveweighed with any jury to touch the life of a white man. And sincethe trial, facts have come to light materially lessening thecredibility of the evidence which led to conviction.

The glaring unfairness of his mode of trial is of itselfsufficient ground for this protest. The maxim which gives to theaccused a trial by his peers was essentially violated. In acommunity where sympathy with a colored man is a rare andunpopular sentiment, the prisoner should have been tried by ajury composed partly, at least, of his own race. This violationof the principles of equal justice demands our solemn protest.

We claim also that the petition of more than 20,000 of our fellow-citizens to have this man’s life spared, demands respect. Such anumber of voluntary petitioners, all upon one side, indicates thewill of the sovereign people of the State, that the penaltyshould be commuted. Our respect for the right of the people to avoice and a just influence in the administration of publicjustice, also demands this solemn protest against the legalmurder of Washington Goode.






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May: While spraying his fruit trees for slugs, an appropriate analogy occurred to Waldo Emerson.

His brother-in-law Charles T. Jackson of the Boston Society of Natural History, who had filed for a US patent on the use of sulfuric ether as an anesthetic but who could get no credit for this, had “more vicious enemies






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than any slugs that are on my leaves.”

May 25, Friday: This was Waldo Emerson’s 46th birthday.

Thomas Greene Wiggins was born to the slaves Domingo “Mingo” Wiggins, a field slave, and Charity Greene of Columbus GA. Domingo and Charity’s slavemaster would suppose this blind sickly “pickaninny” to have no labor potential, and so, a couple of years later when he sold off the father and mother, it was possible for them to carry Tom along at no additional charge to the purchaser. Although Tom’s parents had married, the prevailing custom of the time was that married female slaves and their offspring were to be known the names of their owners — following slavery tradition, therefore, the infant was to grow up as Thomas Greene Bethune.

It had been thirteen years since the last execution in Boston, and many had hoped there would be no more. Because of the petitionary unrest, it was not considered advisable to attempt to hang Washington Goode on







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Boston Common, so, in order to witness this man die, many were reduced to the indignity of perching upon the rooftops overlooking the city’s jailyard.

The going price for a nice window view is reported to have been $20 or higher. The condemned man was so weak from loss of blood from his suicide attempt of the previous night that he needed to be carried to his gallows strapped to a chair. Evidently the warden had elected to ignore the plea of a local newspaper, that as had been done in Brooklyn a few years earlier, he offer the victim the option of the new discovery ether before dropping the trap of the scaffold. This was during a rainstorm, for we have a report that one of the packed spectators in the courtyard is reported to have cried out “Down with your umbrellas, and let’s see the bloody nigger swing!” The condemned man strapped in the chair, offered a cup of water, commented “This is the last Cochituate water that I shall ever drink.”

This is not the Boston prison gallows as of 1849, but the Gloucester prison gallows as of 1900.






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Famous Last Words:“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.”

— A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787

“The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.”

—Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

1836 James Madison unsolicited comment “I always talk better lying down.”

1846 Benjamin Robert Haydon final entry in 38-year journal before offing himself

“Stretch me no longer on this tough world. — Lear”

1848 John Quincy Adams had just voted “no” on war on Mexico “This is the last of earth. I am composed.”

1849 Washington Goode offered a cup of water before being hanged in Boston

“This is the last Cochituate water that I shall ever drink.”

1849 Edgar Allan Poe in bad shape in Baltimore “Lord help my poor soul.”

1850 John Caldwell Calhoun unsolicited comment “The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of her.”

... other famous last words ...






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The assembly sang a hymn, one that had been selected by Goode himself:

At 9:50AM, local time, the trapdoor of the scaffold beneath the chair with the negro strapped into it was triggered and fell open with a thwack and –as the Boston Daily Bee reported– this black soul was “launched into the presence of the Supreme Being of us all.”






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March 21, Thursday: From the Salem Register: “Hawthorne seeks to vent his spite ... by small sneers at Salem, and by vilifying some of his former associates, to a degree of which we should have supposed any gentleman ... incapable.... The most venomous, malignant, and unaccountable assault is made upon a venerable gentleman, whose chief crime seems to be that he loves a good dinner.”

The chemist Charles T. Jackson, Mrs. Lidian Emerson’s brother the ether controversialist, testified for the prosecution in re the Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. John White Webster that no traces of the normal embalming preservatives had been found in the remains of Doctor George Parkman. He also commented that he noticed that the 6-inch Bowie knife which the professor had habitually kept on his desk had seemed to have been recently cleaned.

In the middle of the testimony there was a ruckus, for a portion of the Tremont House had gone up in flames and fire brigades were rushing to the rescue.14

1850

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE


WILLIAM THOMAS GREEN MORTON






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March 27, Wednesday: The defense began to present its case in re the Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. John White Webster. Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that, since the chemist Charles T. Jackson had testified for the

14. The Redding & Company that is mentioned in the above snippet from WALDEN was a periodical depot at 8 State Street in downtown Boston. They served the “easy reading” end of the market. The company had begun as a newspaper depot in the 1830s, became a periodical depot in the 1840s, and by the 1850s was a book publisher and seller as well as a tea merchant. George W. Redding (1824-1892) had started as a newsboy, then became a New-York newspaper distributor, then the proprietor of a periodical depot and a publisher of pamphlets such as “Easy Nat; or, Boston Bars and Boston Boys” (1844). Here is the sort of advice it offered to aspiring authors: “You see, our readers want everything condensed, rapid, dramatic. Take any ordinary novel, and cut it down one-half, and it’ll be twice as good as it was before.” Thoreau mentions that they didn’t merely sell magazines and dime novels and tea, but also, sold a few snack items such as nuts and raisins and a few bulk items such as salt and meal. They were really going after the extreme low end of the readership market, “the end with the munchies.” They were certainly never going to offer to sell anyone a book such as WALDEN, although they might well offer the “Readers’ Digest” version (yes, there is such), or one or another of those many-Thoreau-snippets-out-of-context market opportunities that one or another clown seems to be forever generating!






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prosecution, the anesthesia dentist William Thomas Green Morton would testify for the defense. The two men

were professional enemies locked in combat for the great prestige of having been the first to recognize the value of anesthesia during protracted surgery. Doctor Morton suggested that the dental remains which had been discovered in the assay oven could have come from just about any poor stiff who had been cut up in the medical school as a dissection cadaver. Many men’s mouths, in his observation, had exactly Doctor George Parkman’s condition of teeth and dental appliances. The panel of judges found this testimony to be not entirely convincing and would say so, as the dentist who had prepared Parkman’s partial plate had already testified in great detail






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as to all the various characteristics by which he was quite certain that this was the scorched remains of the plate which he had only recently taken the greatest of pains to create and fit for this specific deceased.

DENTISTRY






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Early May: Early in this month Henry Thoreau took sulfuric ether and had all his teeth pulled, replacing them with full dentures.15

By the rarest coincidence, we have preserved this 1850 photo of Scollay Square very near the Boston Athenæum, taken from a window of a building on Tremont Row. The photo shows No. 19, the office of William Thomas Green Morton, the dentist who had begun four years earlier to pioneer the use of ether as an anesthetic:

1851

15. A great deal of research needs to be done here. First, why did Thoreau have all his teeth pulled at once? –Were there standard dentures available and were such off-the-shelf prostheses significantly less costly than partial made-to-order ones? Did sacrificing all one’s teeth cause changes to the voice? Were there health risks at the shock of such a procedure?






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May 12: Thoreau made a remark in his journal by which we can estimate the extent of his negativity toward “priests” of religion, such as what Father Isaac Hecker had made of himself after his persuasion into the Roman Catholic faith. Somehow to his way of thinking this is not unlike anesthesia:

May 12, Monday: Heard the Golden robin & the BobolinkBut where she has her seat whether in Westport or in Boxboro, not even the assessors know– Inquire perchanceof that dusky family on the cross road which is said to have Indian blood in their veins –or perchance where thisold cellar hole now grassed over is faintly visable Nature once had her dwelling– Ask the crazy old womanwho brings huckleberries to the village, but who lives no body knows where.If I have got false teeth, I trust that I have not got a false conscience. It is safer to employ the dentist than thepriest – to repair the deficiencies of Nature.By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from hissenses You are told that it will make you unconscious – but no one can imagine what it is to be unconscious –how far removed from the state of consciousness & all that we call “this world” until he has experienced it.The value of the experiment is that it does give you experience of an interval as between one life and another –A greater space than you ever travelled. you are a sane mind with out organs – groping for organs – which if

it did not soon recover its old sense would get new ones – You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist inyour roots – like a tree in the winter. If you have an inclination to travel take the ether – you go beyond thefurthest star.It is not necessary for them to take ether who in their sane & waking hours are ever translated by a thought –nor for them to see with their hindheads – who sometimes see from their foreheads – nor listen to the spiritualknockings who attend to the intimations of reason & conscience.

September 7, 1851: Our extatic states which appear to yield so little fruit, have this value at least –though in the seasons when our genius reigns we may be powerless for expression.– Yet in calmer seasons,when our talent is active, the memory of those rarer moods comes to color our picture & is the permanent paintpot as it were into which we dip our brushThus no life or experience goes unreported at last — but if it not be solid gold it is gold-leaf which gilds thefurniture of the mind. It is an experience of infinite beauty — on which we unfailingly draw. Which enables us


ETHER






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to exaggerate ever truly. Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poems to showfor them. For those experiences have left and indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.Their truth subsides & in cooler moments we can use them as paint to gild & adorn our prose. When I despairto sing them I will remember that they will furnish me with paint with which to adorn & preserve the works oftalent one day. They are like a pot of pure ether.

October: Charles Darwin, who had been suffering from terrible toothaches for months, visited his dentist, and Mr. Waite gave him chloroform and extracted five teeth. Darwin had been administering chloroform to his wife during her labors, but had not yet tried it himself. He recorded it as “this wonderful Substance.”

1852

ETHER






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April 7, Thursday: Dr. John Snow used chloroform on Queen Victoria for the birth of Prince Leopold. This event would effectively remove much of the stigma then associated with pain relief in childbirth in Great Britain.

April 7: If you make the least correct observation of nature this year, you will have occasion to repeatit with illustrations the next, and the season and life itself is prolonged.

1853

ANESTHESIA






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In Ireland, the endemic poverty, temperance crusades, and high taxes on alcohol were causing recourse to ether as a cheap, readily available alcohol substitute, especially by lower-class Catholics. By 1869 priests would be denouncing this sort of inebriation as sinful.

A public demonstration against Chicago’s prohibition of the sale of beer on Sunday resulted in more than 60 arrests (you have three guesses as to what sort of accent the people had, who got locked up).

This year would represent the peak of the alcohol-abstinence movement for 19th-Century America.

Legal prohibition was in effect for 13 of the 40 states of the Union. (The next such spasm of prohibitionism would begin in 1920. The social cycle from inebriation to dryness seems to approximate 70 years, or about three generations.) About one in every three Americans lived in a place where the sale of alcohol was being

1855

THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

This medallion was issued by the Cork society, in Ireland.






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prohibited, if not entirely prevented.

I say in my thought to my neighbor, who was once my friend, “It is of no use to speak the truth to you,you will not hear it. What, then, shall I say to you?” At the instant that I seem to be saying farewell forever toone who has been my friend, I find myself unexpectedly near to him, and it is our very nearness and clearnessto each other that gives depth and significance to that forever. Thus I am a helpless prisoner and these chainsI have no skill to break. While I think I have broken one link, I have been forging another. I have not yetknown a friendship to cease, I think. I fear I have experienced its decaying. Morning, noon, and night, I suffera physical pain, an aching of the breast which unfits me for my tasks. It is perhaps most intense at evening. Withrespect to Friendship I feel like a wreck that is driving before the gale, with a crew suffering from hunger andthirst, not knowing, what shore, if any, they may reach, so long have I breasted (italics) the conflicting wavesof this sentiment, my seams open, my timbers laid bare. I float on Friendships sea simply because my specificgravity is less than its, but no longer that stanch and graceful vessel that careered so buoyantly over it. My planksand timbers are scattered. At most I hope to make a sort of raft of Friendship, on which, with a few of ourtreasures, we may float to some firm land.That aching of the breast, the grandest pain that man endures, which no ether can assuage. You cheat me.You keep me at a distance with your manners. I know of no other dishonesty, no other devil. Why thisdoubleness, these compliments? They are the worst of lies. A lie is not worse between traders than a complimentbetween friends. I would not, I cannot speak.I will let you feel (italics) my thought, my feeling. Friends! theyare united for good and for evil. They can delight each other as none other can. They can distress each other asnone other can. Lying on lower levels is but a trivial offense compared with civility and compliments on thelevel of Friendship.I visited my friend for joy, not for disturbance. If my coming hinders him in the least conceivable degree, I willexert myself to the utmost to stay away, I will get the Titans to help me to stand aloof, I will labor night and dayto construct a rampart between us. If my coming casts but the shadow of a shadow before it, I will retreat swifterthan the wind and more untrackable. I will be gone irrevocably, if possible, before he fears that I am coming.If the teeth ache, they can be pulled. If the heart aches, what then? Shall we pluck it out?Must friends then expect the fate of those oriental twins,--that one shall at last bear about the corpse of the other,by that same ligature that bound him to a living companion?Look before you leap. Let the isthmus be cut through, unless sea meets sea at exactly the same level, unless aperfect understanding and equilibrium has been established from the beginning around Cape Horn and theunnamed northern cape. What a tumult! It is Atlantic and Atlantic, or is it Atlantic and Pacific.What mean these turtles, these coins of the muddy mint issued in the early spring? The bright spots on their backare vain unless I behold them. The spots seem brighter than ever when first beheld in the spring, as does the

Ethanol Consumption in Annual Gallons per US Adult

1790 5.8

1830 7.1

1840 3.1

1860 2.1

1890 2.1

1900 2.1

1920 0.9

1940 1.56

1980 2.76

1857

The year 1855 represented the peak of the alcohol-abstinence movement for 19th-Century America.






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bark of the willow.I have seen the signs of the spring. I have seen a frog swiftly sinking in a pool, or where he dimpled the surfaceas he lept in. I have seen the brilliant spotted tortoises stirring at the bottom of the ditches. I have seen the clearsap trickling from the red maple.






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I think it was in this year that a monument to sulfuric ether was erected in Boston:

1868






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July 15, day: In New-York, William Thomas Green Morton died at age 49 on of a stroke. His gravestone would term him something like “the discoverer of ether-narcosis.”

Charles T. Jackson, upon visiting Morton’s graveside to view its inscription crediting the dearly departed as the founder of ether and of modern anesthesia, would become agitated.16

16. Charles was prone to some sort of “attack” and the word “paralytic” which was used, although not clinically definitive, suggests that they involved some sort of temporary paralysis. Per a letter from Ellen Emerson to Edith Emerson Forbes dated June 22, 1873:

When it was nearly over, came the little Lidian to take leave,for at noon had come a most alarming telegram saying UncleCharles had had a paralytic shock. At first Mother was indespair, afterward remembering those times which he has oftenhad, she became more hopeful. Since then, Father has seen him,and we have better news. He can speak. This is far more seriousthan previous attacks.Friday morning. Aunt Susan wrote yesterday, more anxiously. Shethinks him worse. Mother may go down today to see him.

Per a letter from Lidian Emerson to Ellen Emerson dated August 6, 1873:

Uncle C[harles] will I trust come to himself to find himselfmaster of his own affairs.... They do not say that C[harles]will get well but every account is better and better.






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In the manuscript for Charles Dickens’s THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, the novel on which he was working when he died, there is a reference to an East End woman who “opium-smoked herself into the strange likeness of the Chinaman.”

Meanwhile, in California, an anti-Chinese movement became overwhelmingly powerful. Winslow Anderson, a San Francisco doctor with a thing for pure young white girls, would at some point in the 1870s become overwhelmed with longing and attest to having witnessed “the sickening sight of young white girls ... lying half-undressed on the floor on couches, smoking with their ‘lovers’... Men and women, Chinese and white people, mix in Chinatown smoking-houses.”

1870






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Charles T. Jackson, who had been having paralytic attacks for many years, finally became so disturbed as to be no longer able to function without institutional assistance.

Having claimed that he had developed the use of ether and having become agitated upon visiting the grave of a competitor, with its gravestone’s competitive assertions –and having previously been laying the claim that he had been the one, not Morse, to have invented the electric telegraph– should have been a warning to his relatives: he would need to spend the last seven years of his life at the MacLean Asylum. Ellen Emerson, in her private biography of her mother Lidian Emerson, wrote about the event and how her mother believed that his “Coesion of the brain” must have been related to his previous experience with his claim to have been the one who had discovered anesthesia:

That was Uncle Charles's last visit to Mother. Lidian[Lidian Jackson, Charles and Susan Jackson’s daughter] stayedto the reception, he [Charles Jackson] and Aunt Susan [Mrs.Susan Jackson] went home, she meaning to return the next day,but instead she telegraphed to Lidian to follow, Uncle Charleshad fallen down in his study and remained unconscious. Motherwas anxious about him but we had our reception just the same....The next day Mother went to see Uncles Charles. He was consciousbut could not talk any intelligible language, he made some newwords and used old ones out of their meaning, and as days went

1873






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on it was evident that his mind was deranged. He never recovered.The trustees or the corporation of the MacLean Asylum atSomerville voted to receive him and keep him withoutcompensation as a recognition of his services to the medicalprofession.... He lived there for several years. Mother [LidianEmerson] and Aunt Susan visited him when the authorities saidhe could bear it. She said he recognized them and was alwaysoverjoyed to see them ... Mother always believed that it wassuffering about the ether discovery that brought on this Coesionof the brain. He was only 67.






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April 27, Thursday: James Elliot Cabot, Bronson Alcott, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Ellery Channing, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and Sheriff Sam Staples were sent for, “to bid him good-bye,” and Sam thoughtfully brought along a bottle of brandy. Waldo Emerson spoke lovingly with Lydian, although mostly unintelligibly. Again and again he made reference to “the beautiful boy” and they supposed him to have been recollecting his first son Wallie who had died in 1842. He was able to make himself understood to Sam and to Judge Hoar. He greeted James Elliot Cabot, his literary executor, by name but by the time Sanborn and Channing saw him, he was dull. According to THE LETTERS OF ELLEN TUCKER EMERSON (Kent OH: Kent State UP, 1982, Volume I, page 690, Volume II, page 676), Emerson had Sanborn dismissed from the room, and presumably this would have been because after urging fighting on other young men he had not himself participated in the Civil War. Dr. James Putnam of Boston was in attendance. We may note that there was a “Confucius say” quote he had liked so much as to have used it twice:

“I will say with Confucius, ‘If in the morning I hear of the right way, and in the evening die, I can be happy.’”

When “a sharp pain came upon him,” his son Dr. Emerson administered sulphurous ether, “which soon relieved him, & kept the ether near his face until near the end” at about 8:30 in the evening.

The bell on the Unitarian Church was tolled, 79 strokes.

Dr. Garnett, Emerson’s biographer, would write:

Seldom had “the reaper whose name is Death” gathered suchillustrious harvest as between December 1880 and April 1882.In the first month of this period George Eliot passed away, inthe ensuing February Carlyle followed; in April LordBeaconsfield died, deplored by his party, nor unregretted by hiscountry; in February of the following year Longfellow wascarried to the tomb; in April Rossetti was laid to rest by thesea, and the pavement of Westminster Abbey was disturbed toreceive the dust of Darwin. And now Emerson lay down in deathbeside the painter of man and the searcher of nature, theEnglish-Oriental statesman, the poet of the plain man and thepoet of the artist, and the prophet whose name is indissolublylinked with his own. All these men passed into eternity ladenwith the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it be said,

1882

EMERSON AND CHINA

ETHER






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as of Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and themost potent intellectual force of a continent had departed alongwith him.

Kate Greenaway, author of children’s books, published her LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS, one of the more popular dictionaries on this topic.

In 1827 Leroux had extracted Salicin, an ingredient of willow bark used to relieve fever and rheumatic pain. In 1838, salicyclic acid had been manufactured from salicin. In 1853, acetylsalicyclic acid had been synthesized by Charles Gerhardt. Beginning in this year and continuing to 1894, the aspirin family of pain and fever relievers would be being introduced by the German chemical industry — think Bayer.

In Finland, drunkenness had come to be such a major problem among unskilled urban laborers that a prohibition movement had developed. In this year all beverages containing over 22% alcohol came to be regulated, and in the following year rural sales would be banned.

1884

PLANTS






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Between 1880 and 1904 the prohibition movement in the USA would succeed in enacting many new laws against alcohol at the state level.

An assistant to Sigmund Freud touched purified cocaine to his tongue and discovered a numbing sensation. Dr. Freud termed cocaine “magical,” suggesting its use in localized anesthesia. Carl Koller demonstrated its usefulness in eye surgery. (Eventually, however, when this drug would turn out to be more addictive even than morphine, Freud would be attacked for having participated in loosing “the third scourge of mankind.” A similar chemical compound would be produced synthetically, “procaine” commonly sold under the trade name ‘Novocain,” and by now this has replaced cocaine for medicinal purposes.)






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Ether drinkers were becoming more numerous and diverse in Ireland as ether became more available and cheaper, and temperance campaigns and fiscal policies make alcohol less desirable, less available, and costlier. By the 1890s, the use of ether as an intoxicant by sophisticate upper classes has declined, possibly in part because of a rise in the availability and popularity of morphine which is pleasanter to use and leaves no tell-tale smell. Use continues to grow among lower classes and peasant communities of Prussia, Hungary, Austria, Russia, Norway, France, and Great Britain. As in Ireland, heavy alcohol taxes may have contributed to this phenomenon.

Parnell’s divorce case at this point led to his being deposed from the leadership of the Irish Party. In a year he would be dead. It is estimated that at this point 1/8th of the population of Londonderry and Tyrone counties in Ireland were reduced by the unavailability of alcohol to the use of ether, not for purposes of anesthesia but for purposes of recreational intoxication. The spread of ether into the other counties of Ireland would be driven back by Catholicism and by the law before it could take root (helped along by the fact that a less marginal peasantry would find the drug to be less appealing than alcohol and would therefore abandon it after limited experimentation).

Bayer pharmaceutical corporation registered and marketed Felix Hoffman’s acetylsalicylic acid under the brand name “Aspirin.”

The 1st edition of the MERCK’S MANUAL OF THE MATERIA MEDICA / TOGETHER WITH A SUMMARY OF THERAPEUTIC INDICATIONS AND A CLASSIFICATION OF MEDICAMENTS: A READY-REFERENCE POCKET BOOK FOR THE PRACTICING PHYSICIAN, for carrying in the black bag of physicians making house calls, although it contained but 192 pages (it now has 2,833), found space to record the following list of potential remedies for that most prevalent American complaint, melancholy (only the first half of the lengthy list is shown below):

Melancholia. — See also, Hypochondiasis, Hysteria, Insanity.Acid, Hydrocyanic.Acid, Nitrohydrochloric after meals: if associated with oxaluria.Alcohol.Arsenic: in aged persons along with opium.Belladonna.Bromides.Caffeine.Camphor.Cannabis Indica.Chloral Hydrate: as hypnotic.Chloroform: for insomnia.Cimicifuga : in puerperal or uterine despondency.Cocaine.Colchicum.Colocynth.Galvanism.

1890

1899

THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT






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Gold.Ignatia.Iron.Morphine.Musk.Nitrous Oxide.Opium: in small doses especially useful.Paraldehyde.Phosphorus.... [etc.]

Localized use of ether in Ireland continued, since this liquid was still freely available from pharmacists. Some clandestine trade also developed.

The Spanish, who for centuries had been the prime consumers of chocolate per capita, had at this point fallen far behind. The Germans had come to hold the lead in consumption per capita, followed by the United States, France, and Great Britain. Within a decade or two the Swiss (I know this is hard to imagine) would be seizing the lead in chocolate consumption per capita.

George Cadbury founded the Bournville Village Trust. This included 330 acres of land, providing spacious and sanitary houses. By 1915 Bournville’s infant mortality rate would be down to 47 per 1,000 live births, whereas in central Birmingham the rate would in contrast be 187 per 1,000.

Ireland’s Intoxicating Liquor Act increased restrictions on sales of ether and made the drinking of it an offense, but with minimal impact on practices.

Further restrictions on indulgence in ether in Ireland permitted registered sales only to doctors. This, combined with on the one side with greater availability of cheap alcohol and on the other with rising incomes, would bring about reductions in use.

The bans against cigarettes had by this point been rescinded in all states, and taxes upon tobacco products had become a major source of government revenue. A wave of mortality due to respiratory-system cancers was about to sweep over the nation.

1900

1923

1927






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October 28: There was an article in the New York Times on the repeated antebellum medical experiments on female slaves in the deep South, without anesthesia, by Dr. J. Marion Sims, who would become renown as the “father of gynecology”:

Scholars Argue Over Legacy of SurgeonWho Was Lionized, Then Vilified

By BARRON H. LERNEROne would be hard pressed to find a more controversial figurein the history of medicine than J. Marion Sims. Originallylionized as the “father of gynecology,” Sims was later reviledby a generation of critics as racist and sexist.Today, as an operation introduced by Sims is bringing relief tothousands of women in the developing world, a few scholars arequietly hoping to rehabilitate his name. But it is not going tobe easy.Sims, who was born in South Carolina in 1813, was not destinedfor greatness. He was a lackluster student who showed littleambition after receiving his medical degree.But he changed after a chance event in 1845. While evaluating awoman with a slipped, or prolapsed, uterus, Sims, then livingin Alabama, had her kneel and place her chest close to her knees.This position not only moved the woman’s uterus back into place,but it afforded him an excellent view of how childbirth haddamaged her anatomy.Sims used this insight to tackle a most dreaded complication ofchildbirth, usually caused by prolonged labor. With thisdisorder, known as the vesico-vaginal fistula, connectionsdevelop between a woman’s bladder and vagina.Afflicted women continually drip urine from their vaginas,producing, in the words of one 19th-century physician, “a mostintolerable stench.” Even worse, fistulas sometimes developbetween the bowels and the vagina.By placing women in his new position, Sims reasoned, he couldbetter visualize the damaged tissues and could surgically repairthe fistulas. The logical women to test his theory, he believed,were slaves.By all accounts, Sims, like a vast majority of his antebellumSouthern white counterparts, was a strong proponent of slavery.Thus, when Sims wanted fistula patients, he simply bought orrented the slaves from their owners.Sims operated on at least 10 slave women from 1846 to 1849,perfecting his technique. It took dozens of operations beforehe finally reported success, having used special silver suturesto close the fistulas. Three of the slaves –Lucy, Anarcha andBetsy– all underwent multiple procedures without anesthesia,which had recently become available. Sims’s records show thathe operated on Anarcha 30 times.Sims’s persistence aroused some alarm, and several physiciansurged him to stop experimenting. In response, he later reportedthat the slave women had been “clamorous” for the operation and

2003






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had even assisted him with surgery.Sims’s contemporaries and early biographers heralded his feat.His skillful experiments, according to his obituary in The NewYork Times in 1883, “were of great advantage to members of hisprofession in the treatment of female diseases.” An inscriptionnear Sims’s birthplace termed him “a blessing and a benefactorto women.”Statues of Sims were erected in South Carolina, Alabama and NewYork City, where in 1855 he opened the first hospitalexclusively for women. The New York statue stands in CentralPark at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street.One of Sims’s modern legacies is the almost total absence ofvesico-vaginal fistulas in the developed world, because ofadvances in childbirth and the operation he pioneered.From this lofty perch, Sims had a long way to fall. And fall hedid, beginning in the mid-1970’s, as Americans dealt with thevolatile issues of racial and sexual equality. Historians, manyof them sympathetic to the civil rights and women’s movements,saw an urgent need to revise Sims’s history.One of the first scholars to weigh in was Dr. Graham J. Barker-Benfield, then a historian at Trinity College in England, whoargued that Sims had used slave women as guinea pigs to advancehis career.The women, Dr. Barker-Benfield wrote in 1974, had “endured yearsof almost unimaginable agonies” undergoing repeated surgery.Rather than being willing participants, the women had beenpowerless to refuse.Writing in 1985, Diana E. Axelsen, a philosopher at SpelmanCollege, described Sims’s patients as “victims of medicalexperimentation.” Wendy Brinker, a South Carolina filmmaker,nicknamed Sims “Father Butcher” and asked why the state’smonument to him still stood.Underlying these pronouncements was the belief that Sims’s earlybiographers had been guilty of “presentism,” evaluating pastevents based on their own values at the time. Living in an erathat uncritically celebrated white male doctors, the historianscontended, these writers had viewed Sims far too favorably.More recently, a few scholars have been trying to revise thisrevisionist history. “To deify or vilify Sims is not theanswer,” said Dr. Deborah Kuhn McGregor, a historian at theUniversity of Illinois at Springfield. Dr. McGregor uses Sims’sstory in her book SEXUAL SURGERY AND THE ORIGINS OF GYNECOLOGY todiscuss the complex ways that race and sex influence medicalpractice.One of Sims’s strongest defenders these days would have to beDr. L. Lewis Wall, a Washington University surgeon who believesthat the scholars who pilloried Sims were guilty of the samepresentism they had identified in others’ work.Dr. Wall has a special reason for coming to Sims’s defense. Heroutinely travels to Africa to repair vesico-vaginal fistulas.Contending that the rest of the world has lost interest in thevictims of this disorder, who may still number in the millions,he has founded the Worldwide Fund for Mothers Injured inChildbirth (www.wfmic.org).“These kinds of pathologies no longer exist here,” Dr. Wallnoted. But women with fistulas are “absolutely miserable andabsolutely outcasts, reeking of urine 24 hours a day,” he said,






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noting that he can restore both the health and dignity of suchwomen.But does this justify what Sims did? Many do not think so. WhenDr. Wall made a presentation on Sims at a recent meeting of theAmerican Association for the History of Medicine, members of theaudience challenged the idea that his admirable efforts as asurgeon gave him valid historical insights.Ms. Brinker is not even sure that Sims’s procedure worked,pointing out that his logs do not have follow-up data of his“cured” patients. “It was all about his glory,” she argues.Probably the only way to definitively resolve the debates overSims would be to hear the voices of the slave women who were hissubjects. But aside from Sims’s statements, their words have notbeen preserved.At the very least, Dr. Wall suggests on his Web site, someoneshould build a statue to Lucy, Anarcha and Betsy.The story of J. Marion Sims is a reminder of how history getsrewritten over time. The hope, of course, is that each newaccount gets closer to the truth.






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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 20 Miles Avenue, Providence RI 02906. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

Prepared: April 29, 2013

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

mailto:[email protected]

Well, tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?

Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.






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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request wehave pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out ofthe shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). Whatthese chronological lists are: they are research reportscompiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data moduleswhich we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining.To respond to such a request for information, we merely push abutton.






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Commonly, the first output of the program has obviousdeficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modulesstored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, andthen we need to punch that button again and do a recompile ofthe chronology — but there is nothing here that remotelyresembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know andlove. As the contents of this originating contexture improve,and as the programming improves, and as funding becomesavailable (to date no funding whatever has been needed in thecreation of this facility, the entire operation being run outof pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweakingand recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation ofa generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward andupward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place your requests with <[email protected]>.Arrgh.

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diethyl ether (ch3ch2o and painless ddiethyl ether (ch3ch2)2o and painless dentistry and yet — in...

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