Remarks on the superinduction of anaesthesia in natural and morbid parturition : with cases illustrative of the use and effects of chloroform in obstetric practice / By J.Y. Simpson...With an appendix.

  • Simpson, James Young, 1811-1870.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the superinduction of anaesthesia in natural and morbid parturition : with cases illustrative of the use and effects of chloroform in obstetric practice / By J.Y. Simpson...With an appendix. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    The sentiments which Mr. Bell here expresses, are those with which the human mind often looks back upon our opinions and practices, when these opinions and practices are past and gone, and have become mere matters of history. In the above, as in many other instances, we never become fully awakened to the cruelty and enormity of some of our established doctrines and doings, until, from time to time, an advance is made in civilization or science, and we find that this or that doctrine and practice, with all its attendant sufferings and inhumanities, was in reality utterly unnecessary, and utterly uncalled for.* In general, however, long years elapse before this new aspect of matters is duly seen, or at least, duly acknowledged. While the practices themselves are in full operation, the mind enthralled by education and habit, cannot be easily made to view them in their true character; and when, in the progress of the march of knowledge and science, their propriety and perpetuation come at last to be challenged and contested, human passions and prejudices ever (as in the above instance of cauterization) rise up to argue for, and insist upon, the con- tinuance and safety of the past, and the total impolicy and high peril of any attempted alteration. But time passes on, and brings with it, sometimes abruptly—generally almost imper- ceptibly—a perfect change of doctrine and practice. Any sur- geon who, in the days of Pare, dared to arrest the hemorrhages from his amputation wounds, by applying ligatures instead of red-hot irons, would have been denounced by his compeers. Any surgeon, on the contrary, who now, at this present day, dared to arrest the hemorrhages from his amputation wounds, * Witness, for example,—(as compared with the past opinions of those who practiced them)—our present opinions regarding the burning, by our Druidical forefathers, of whole wickerfulls of living human beings, and in the name of religion ; or, in times nearer our own—in Christian times—the application of the fire and fagot by man to man, still under the plea of religion; or the use of the rack and torture; the incremation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of many poor wretches for the alleged crime of witchcraft; the altered existing ideas regarding the required frequency of capital punishments, and the whole question regarding their policy; the recent rapid and complete change of doctrine regarding the horrors and inhumanity of slavery ; the changes in practice regard- ing insanity from what it was in the last century, when chains and a dungeon were the portion of every poor lunatic ; &c. &c.