Proceedings of the Dublin Obstetrical Society for session 1872-73.

  • Dublin Obstetrical Society.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Proceedings of the Dublin Obstetrical Society for session 1872-73. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    and gave us new stand-points from which further progress has been attained. Simpson was a voluminous writer, Beatty not nearly so much so. Neither of them ever published a systematic treatise. Their writings, for the most part, took the form of detached essays, published from time to time in the medical journals; but which have since been collected and republished. The subjects on which they wrote were often parallel. Beatty himself thought his papers on the Forceps, Ergot of Rye, Chloro- form, Cancer of the Uterus, and Abdominal Aneurism, the most impor- tant—with these it was his ambition that his name should be associated. Simpson’s name is, perhaps, best known in connexion with his papers on Chloroform. These attracted much popular attention, but several others are, in a professional point of view, more valuable, especially I would say, those on the Use of the Uterine Sound, and on the Diagnosis of the Diseases of Women. In the remarks I had the honour last year to address to you from this chair, I dwelt at sufficient length on the part taken by Beatty, following in the footsteps of his father and assisted by Dr. Churchill, in re-intro- ducing the use of the forceps into Irish midwifery. It is not neces- sary to recur to this now, so I shall pass on to the papers on chloroform. The production of anaesthesia or insensibility to pain by the inhalation of chloroform, was, unquestionably, the discovery of Simpson. By some very inaccurate thinkers he has been accused of having claimed for himself to have discovered the power to produce anaesthesia. Even a superficial examination of his writings would refute this; but the charge was brought against him in such a manner that from his death-bed he replied to it in definite terms. He showed that the means of producing insensibility to pain had long been sought for. That from so early a period as 700 years before Christ we have records of this. That at the end of the last century Davy showed that insensibility might be induced by the inhalation of nitrous oxide, and some thirty years afterwards Faraday, in England, and Godman, in America, found that the inhalation of the vapour of sulphuric ether produced a similar effect. That on the 11th of December, 1844, Dr. Wells, an American dentist, had two teeth drawn from himself while he was insensible from the inhalation of nitrous oxide, and on the 20th of September, 1846, Morton, at Boston, drew a tooth from Eben Frost while he was insensible from the use of sulphuric ether.