Such is the history of the discovery of the use of anæsthetics. Probably, none has ever added so largely to that part of happiness which consists in the escape from pain. Past all counting is the sum of happiness enjoyed by the millions who, in the last three-and-thirty years, have escaped the pains that were inevitable in surgical operations; pains made more terrible by apprehension, more keen by close attention; sometimes awful in a swift agony, sometimes prolonged beyond even the most patient endurance, and then renewed in memory and terrible in dreams. These will never be felt again. But the value of the discovery is not limited by the abolition of these pains or the pains of childbirth. It would need a long essay to tell how it has enlarged the field of useful surgery, making many things easy that were difficult, many safe that were too perilous, many practicable that were nearly impossible. And, yet more variously, the discovery has brought happiness in the relief of some of the intensest pains of sickness, in quieting convulsion, in helping to the discrimination of obscure diseases. The tale of its utility would not end here; another essay might tell its multiform uses in the study of physiology, reaching even to that of the elemental processes in plants, for these, as Claude Bernard has shown, may be completely for a time suspended in the sleep produced by chloroform or ether.
And now, what of the discoverers?[1] What did time bring to those who brought so great happiness to mankind?
Probably most people would agree that Long, Wells, Morton and Jackson deserved rewards, which none of the four received. But that which the controversy and the patent and the employment of legal advisers made it necessary to determine was, whether more than one deserved reward, and, if more than one, the proportion to be assigned to each. Here was the difficulty. The French Academy of Sciences in 1850 granted equal shares in the Monthyon Prize to Jackson and to Morton; but Long was unknown to them, and, at the time of the award, the value of nitrous oxide was so hidden by the greater value of ether that Wells's claim was set aside. A memorial column was erected at Boston, soon after Morton's death in 1868, and here the difficulty was shirked by dedicating the column to the discovery of ether, and not naming the discoverers. The difficulty could not be thus settled; and, in all probability, our supposed council of four or five would not solve it. One would prefer the claims of absolute priority; another those of suggestive science; another the courage of bold adventure; sentiment and sympathy would variously affect their judgments. And if we suppose that they, like the American Congress, had to discuss their differences within sound of such controversies as followed Morton's first use of ether, or during a war of pamphlets, or under burdens of parliamentary papers, we should expect that their clearest decision would be that a just decision could not be given, and that gratitude must die if it had to wait till distributive justice could be satisfied. The gloomy fate of the American discoverers makes one wish that gratitude could have been let flow of its own impulse; it would have done less wrong than the desire for justice did. A lesson of the whole story is that gratitude and justice are often incompatible; and that when they conflict, then, usually, "the more right the more hurt."