treated to a painless and efficient exposition. Later, Liston performed an
excision of the nail of the great toe, a surprisingly painful operation that
had always distressed patients and surgeons alike. Before operating, Liston
told the assembled surgical students, “We are going to try a Yankee dodge
today, gentlemen, for making men insensible.”
When the toenail removal operation was successful (with a nineteen-
year-old Joseph Lister in attendance), there was a similar refrain, among
the operators and spectators alike, that ether anesthesia was no “Yankee
dodge.” Inhalant anesthesia was so obviously a breakthrough that anyone
who witnessed it immediately knew there was no going back. Within
months, the ether transformation spread across Europe, in an instant
changing the way surgeons treated their patients.
James Young Simpson (1811–1870), a pioneering Scottish obstetrician
who trained and practiced in Edinburgh, learned of Liston’s ether
anesthesia performances and wasting no time, immediately traveled to
London and met with Liston and watched several operations. In a matter of
weeks, Simpson was experimenting with ether on obstetric patients, a true
testament to the rough and tumble days of medicine where patients were
entirely at the mercy of their doctors. Before there were guinea pigs and
lab rats, humans were the chief experimental subjects.
Simpson began a program of auto-experimentation when he considered
that ether’s serious drawback was its high flammability, a significant
feature in light of Simpson’s use of ether in Edinburgh homes, where
candlelight, gaslight, and coal fires were ubiquitous. An explosion would
be lethal for everyone in the vicinity, and given Edinburgh’s crowded 19th-
century tenement buildings, a detonation would be cataclysmic. Simpson
and his scientific associates assayed and evaluated any chemical they
could get their hands on, stumbling upon chloroform in November 1847,
on the advice of a chemist friend.
Assembled at Simpson’s house in Edinburgh, a group of men and
women experimented with the effects of chloroform, reminiscent of the
frolics that led to the use of ether in America. The investigative protocol
was simple: Simpson and his physician friends held tumblers in their
hands, and after pouring the test liquid in their glass vessels, inhaled the
vapors to determine if any effect was achieved. On November 4, 1847,
Simpson recalled a small bottle of a heavy liquid that he had earlier
doubted would lead to success, “and with each tumbler newly charged, the
marcin
(Marcin)
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