Atlanta, the son of a prosperous merchant. After college in Athens,
Georgia, Long attended medical school at the oldest medical school in
America, the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1839. The school
was founded by physicians and surgeons who had trained in Europe, and
Long was fortunate to receive the best education possible, although in
1839 this meant no understanding of germs, cancer, the cellular basis of
disease, and a medical world free of anesthesia and antibiotics. Long did
learn a proper scientific approach, even if his medical mentors were
practicing a form of medicine that was broadly feeble.
Crawford Long left Philadelphia and completed an internship in New
York City by 1841. Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the
nation (founded in 1736), was a place for primitive, hurried surgery when
Long was in the city; in the 1830s there was absolutely no sub-
specialization in surgery—because nothing worked. However, the benefit
of training in urban hospitals, teeming with patients and overflowing with
diseases, has always been vital. In medicine and surgery, volume of
experience is critical, and during Long’s education, with medical journals
in their infancy, nothing could substitute for sheer numbers of diseased
and injured patients. Of course, medicine in mid–19th century America
was completely ineffectual, but the new art of diagnosis (as pioneered by
Morgagni and Rokitansky) at least allowed doctors to make educated
guesses about what was killing their patients.
There can be no doubt that the avalanche of suffering patients in New
York, coupled with Long’s indoctrination to the mysterious authority of
laughing gas and ether, triggered a hypothesis about their ability to
empower insensibility. There is no evidence that Long discussed the
potential use of gases in providing anesthesia while in New York, but
curiously, after training in two of the most important medical meccas in
America, he retreated to another tiny Georgia town and just one year later,
made history.
Within a year of Crawford Long arriving in Jefferson (a neighboring
town to Danielsville), history was made, even though it would take years
for the world to realize what had happened. On March 30, 1842, Crawford
Long provided (what would become known as) anesthesia to a young man
with a tumor growing on the back of his neck. The shoebox two-story,
redbrick building where the breakthrough occurred is still preserved on
College Street in Jefferson, where the tall, slender, bearded Southerner
marcin
(Marcin)
#1