A History of Science Volume IV Part 11

"Immediately after a journey of one hundred and twenty-six miles, in which I had no sleep the preceding night, being much exhausted, I respired seven quarts of nitrous oxide gas for near three minutes. It produced the usual pleasurable effects and slight muscular motion. I continued exhilarated for some minutes afterwards, but in half an hour found myself neither more nor less exhausted than before the experiment.

I had a great propensity to sleep.

"To ascertain with certainty whether the more extensive action of nitrous oxide compatible with life was capable of producing debility, I resolved to breathe the gas for such a time, and in such quant.i.ties, as to produce excitement equal in duration and superior in intensity to that occasioned by high intoxication from opium or alcohol.

"To habituate myself to the excitement, and to carry it on gradually, on December 26th I was enclosed in an air-tight breathing-box, of the capacity of about nine and one-half cubic feet, in the presence of Dr.

Kinglake. After I had taken a situation in which I could by means of a curved thermometer inserted under the arm, and a stop-watch, ascertain the alterations in my pulse and animal heat, twenty quarts of nitrous oxide were thrown into the box.

"For three minutes I experienced no alteration in my sensations, though immediately after the introduction of the nitrous oxide the smell and taste of it were very evident. In four minutes I began to feel a slight glow in the cheeks and a generally diffused warmth over the chest, though the temperature of the box was not quite 50 degrees.... In twenty-five minutes the animal heat was 100 degrees, pulse 124. In thirty minutes twenty quarts more of gas were introduced.

"My sensations were now pleasant; I had a generally diffused warmth without the slightest moisture of the skin, a sense of exhilaration similar to that produced by a small dose of wine, and a disposition to muscular motion and to merriment.

"In three-quarters of an hour the pulse was 104 and the animal heat not 99.5 degrees, the temperature of the chamber 64 degrees. The pleasurable feelings continued to increase, the pulse became fuller and slower, till in about an hour it was 88, when the animal heat was 99 degrees. Twenty quarts more of air were admitted. I had now a great disposition to laugh, luminous points seemed frequently to pa.s.s before my eyes, my hearing was certainly more acute, and I felt a pleasant lightness and power of exertion in my muscles. In a short time the symptoms became stationary; breathing was rather oppressed, and on account of the great desire for action rest was painful.

"I now came out of the box, having been in precisely an hour and a quarter. The moment after I began to respire twenty quarts of unmingled nitrous oxide. A thrilling extending from the chest to the extremities was almost immediately produced. I felt a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb; my visible impressions were dazzling and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room, and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees, as the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly pa.s.sed through my mind and were connected with words in such a manner as to produce perceptions perfectly novel.

"I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorized; I imagined that I made discoveries. When I was awakened from this semi-delirious trance by Dr. Kinglake, who took the bag from my mouth, indignation and pride were the first feelings produced by the sight of persons about me. My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime; and for a minute I walked about the room perfectly regardless of what was said to me. As I recovered my former state of mind, I felt an inclination to communicate the discoveries I had made during the experiment. I endeavored to recall the ideas--they were feeble and indistinct; one collection of terms, however, presented itself, and, with most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr.

Kinglake, 'Nothing exists but thoughts!--the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains.' "(3)

From this account we see that Davy has anaesthetized himself to a point where consciousness of surroundings was lost, but not past the stage of exhilaration. Had Dr. Kinglake allowed the inhaling-bag to remain in Davy's mouth for a few moments longer complete insensibility would have followed. As it was, Davy appears to have realized that sensibility was dulled, for he adds this illuminative suggestion: "As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place."(4)

Unfortunately no one took advantage of this suggestion at the time, and Davy himself became interested in other fields of science and never returned to his physiological studies, thus barely missing one of the greatest discoveries in the entire field of science. In the generation that followed no one seems to have thought of putting Davy's suggestion to the test, and the surgeons of Europe had acknowledged with one accord that all hope of finding a means to render operations painless must be utterly abandoned--that the surgeon's knife must ever remain a synonym for slow and indescribable torture. By an odd coincidence it chanced that Sir Benjamin Brodie, the acknowledged leader of English surgeons, had publicly expressed this as his deliberate though regretted opinion at a time when the quest which he considered futile had already led to the most brilliant success in America, and while the announcement of the discovery, which then had no transatlantic cable to convey it, was actually on its way to the Old World.

The American dentist just referred to, who was, with one exception to be noted presently, the first man in the world to conceive that the administration of a definite drug might render a surgical operation painless and to give the belief application was Dr. Horace Wells, of Hartford, Connecticut. The drug with which he experimented was nitrous oxide--the same that Davy had used; the operation that he rendered painless was no more important than the extraction of a tooth--yet it sufficed to mark a principle; the year of the experiment was 1844.

The experiments of Dr. Wells, however, though important, were not sufficiently demonstrative to bring the matter prominently to the attention of the medical world. The drug with which he experimented proved not always reliable, and he himself seems ultimately to have given the matter up, or at least to have relaxed his efforts.

But meantime a friend, to whom he had communicated his belief and expectations, took the matter up, and with unremitting zeal carried forward experiments that were destined to lead to more tangible results.

This friend was another dentist, Dr. W. T. G. Morton, of Boston, then a young man full of youthful energy and enthusiasm. He seems to have felt that the drug with which Wells had experimented was not the most practicable one for the purpose, and so for several months he experimented with other allied drugs, until finally he hit upon sulphuric ether, and with this was able to make experiments upon animals, and then upon patients in the dental chair, that seemed to him absolutely demonstrative.

Full of eager enthusiasm, and absolutely confident of his results, he at once went to Dr. J. C. Warren, one of the foremost surgeons of Boston, and asked permission to test his discovery decisively on one of the patients at the Boston Hospital during a severe operation. The request was granted; the test was made on October 16, 1846, in the presence of several of the foremost surgeons of the city and of a body of medical students. The patient slept quietly while the surgeon's knife was plied, and awoke to astonished comprehension that the ordeal was over. The impossible, the miraculous, had been accomplished.(5)

Swiftly as steam could carry it--slowly enough we should think it to-day--the news was heralded to all the world. It was received in Europe with incredulity, which vanished before repeated experiments.

Surgeons were loath to believe that ether, a drug that had long held a place in the subordinate armamentarium of the physician, could accomplish such a miracle. But scepticism vanished before the tests which any surgeon might make, and which surgeons all over the world did make within the next few weeks. Then there came a lingering outcry from a few surgeons, notably some of the Parisians, that the shock of pain was beneficial to the patient, hence that anaesthesia--as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes had christened the new method--was a procedure not to be advised. Then, too, there came a hue-and-cry from many a pulpit that pain was G.o.d-given, and hence, on moral grounds, to be clung to rather than renounced. But the outcry of the antediluvians of both hospital and pulpit quickly received its quietus; for soon it was clear that the patient who did not suffer the shock of pain during an operation rallied better than the one who did so suffer, while all humanity outside the pulpit cried shame to the spirit that would doom mankind to suffer needless agony. And so within a few months after that initial operation at the Boston Hospital in 1846, ether had made good its conquest of pain throughout the civilized world. Only by the most active use of the imagination can we of this present day realize the full meaning of that victory.

It remains to be added that in the subsequent bickerings over the discovery--such bickerings as follow every great advance--two other names came into prominent notice as sharers in the glory of the new method. Both these were Americans--the one, Dr. Charles T. Jackson, of Boston; the other, Dr. Crawford W. Long, of Alabama. As to Dr. Jackson, it is sufficient to say that he seems to have had some vague inkling of the peculiar properties of ether before Morton's discovery. He even suggested the use of this drug to Morton, not knowing that Morton had already tried it; but this is the full measure of his a.s.sociation with the discovery. Hence it is clear that Jackson's claim to equal share with Morton in the discovery was unwarranted, not to say absurd.

Dr. Long's a.s.sociation with the matter was far different and altogether honorable. By one of those coincidences so common in the history of discovery, he was experimenting with ether as a pain-destroyer simultaneously with Morton, though neither so much as knew of the existence of the other. While a medical student he had once inhaled ether for the intoxicant effects, as other medical students were wont to do, and when partially under influence of the drug he had noticed that a chance blow to his shins was painless. This gave him the idea that ether might be used in surgical operations; and in subsequent years, in the course of his practice in a small Georgia town, he put the idea into successful execution. There appears to be no doubt whatever that he performed successful minor operations under ether some two or three years before Morton's final demonstration; hence that the merit of first using the drug, or indeed any drug, in this way belongs to him. But, unfortunately, Dr. Long did not quite trust the evidence of his own experiments. Just at that time the medical journals were full of accounts of experiments in which painless operations were said to be performed through practice of hypnotism, and Dr. Long feared that his own success might be due to an incidental hypnotic influence rather than to the drug. Hence he delayed announcing his apparent discovery until he should have opportunity for further tests--and opportunities did not come every day to the country pract.i.tioner. And while he waited, Morton antic.i.p.ated him, and the discovery was made known to the world without his aid. It was a true scientific caution that actuated Dr. Long to this delay, but the caution cost him the credit, which might otherwise have been his, of giving to the world one of the greatest blessings--dare we not, perhaps, say the very greatest?--that science has ever conferred upon humanity.

A few months after the use of ether became general, the Scotch surgeon Sir J. Y. Simpson(6) discovered that another drug, chloroform, could be administered with similar effects; that it would, indeed, in many cases produce anaesthesia more advantageously even than ether. From that day till this surgeons have been more or less divided in opinion as to the relative merits of the two drugs; but this fact, of course, has no bearing whatever upon the merit of the first discovery of the method of anaesthesia. Even had some other drug subsequently quite banished ether, the honor of the discovery of the beneficent method of anaesthesia would have been in no wise invalidated. And despite all cavillings, it is unequivocally established that the man who gave that method to the world was William T. G. Morton.

PASTEUR AND THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE

The discovery of the anaesthetic power of drugs was destined presently, in addition to its direct beneficences, to aid greatly in the progress of scientific medicine, by facilitating those experimental studies of animals from which, before the day of anaesthesia, many humane physicians were withheld, and which in recent years have led to discoveries of such inestimable value to humanity. But for the moment this possibility was quite overshadowed by the direct benefits of anaesthesia, and the long strides that were taken in scientific medicine during the first fifteen years after Morton's discovery were mainly independent of such aid. These steps were taken, indeed, in a field that at first glance might seem to have a very slight connection with medicine. Moreover, the chief worker in the field was not himself a physician. He was a chemist, and the work in which he was now engaged was the study of alcoholic fermentation in vinous liquors. Yet these studies paved the way for the most important advances that medicine has made in any century towards the plane of true science; and to this man more than to any other single individual--it might almost be said more than to all other individuals--was due this wonderful advance. It is almost superfluous to add that the name of this marvellous chemist was Louis Pasteur.

The studies of fermentation which Pasteur entered upon in 1854 were aimed at the solution of a controversy that had been waging in the scientific world with varying degrees of activity for a quarter of a century. Back in the thirties, in the day of the early enthusiasm over the perfected microscope, there had arisen a new interest in the minute forms of life which Leeuwenhoek and some of the other early workers with the lens had first described, and which now were shown to be of almost universal prevalence. These minute organisms had been studied more or less by a host of observers, but in particular by the Frenchman Cagniard Latour and the German of cell-theory fame, Theodor Schwann. These men, working independently, had reached the conclusion, about 1837, that the micro-organisms play a vastly more important role in the economy of nature than any one previously had supposed. They held, for example, that the minute specks which largely make up the substance of yeast are living vegetable organisms, and that the growth of these organisms is the cause of the important and familiar process of fermentation. They even came to hold, at least tentatively, the opinion that the somewhat similar micro-organisms to be found in all putrefying matter, animal or vegetable, had a causal relation to the process of putrefaction.

This view, particularly as to the nature of putrefaction, was expressed even more outspokenly a little later by the French botanist Turpin.

Views so supported naturally gained a following; it was equally natural that so radical an innovation should be antagonized. In this case it chanced that one of the most dominating scientific minds of the time, that of Liebig, took a firm and aggressive stand against the new doctrine. In 1839 he promulgated his famous doctrine of fermentation, in which he stood out firmly against any "vitalistic" explanation of the phenomena, alleging that the presence of micro-organisms in fermenting and putrefying substances was merely incidental, and in no sense causal.

This opinion of the great German chemist was in a measure substantiated by experiments of his compatriot Helmholtz, whose earlier experiments confirmed, but later ones contradicted, the observations of Schwann, and this combined authority gave the vitalistic conception a blow from which it had not rallied at the time when Pasteur entered the field. Indeed, it was currently regarded as settled that the early students of the subject had vastly over-estimated the importance of micro-organisms.

And so it came as a new revelation to the generality of scientists of the time, when, in 1857 and the succeeding half-decade, Pasteur published the results of his researches, in which the question had been put to a series of altogether new tests, and brought to unequivocal demonstration.

He proved that the micro-organisms do all that his most imaginative predecessors had suspected, and more. Without them, he proved, there would be no fermentation, no putrefaction--no decay of any tissues, except by the slow process of oxidation. It is the microscopic yeast-plant which, by seizing on certain atoms of the molecule, liberates the remaining atoms in the form of carbonic-acid and alcohol, thus effecting fermentation; it is another microscopic plant--a bacterium, as Devaine had christened it--which in a similar way effects the destruction of organic molecules, producing the condition which we call putrefaction. Pasteur showed, to the amazement of biologists, that there are certain forms of these bacteria which secure the oxygen which all organic life requires, not from the air, but by breaking up unstable molecules in which oxygen is combined; that putrefaction, in short, has its foundation in the activities of these so-called anaerobic bacteria.

In a word, Pasteur showed that all the many familiar processes of the decay of organic tissues are, in effect, forms of fermentation, and would not take place at all except for the presence of the living micro-organisms. A piece of meat, for example, suspended in an atmosphere free from germs, will dry up gradually, without the slightest sign of putrefaction, regardless of the temperature or other conditions to which it may have been subjected. Let us witness one or two series of these experiments as presented by Pasteur himself in one of his numerous papers before the Academy of Sciences.

EXPERIMENTS WITH GRAPE SUGAR

"In the course of the discussion which took place before the Academy upon the subject of the generation of ferments properly so-called, there was a good deal said about that of wine, the oldest fermentation known.

On this account I decided to disprove the theory of M. Fremy by a decisive experiment bearing solely upon the juice of grapes.

"I prepared forty flasks of a capacity of from two hundred and fifty to three hundred cubic centimetres and filled them half full with filtered grape-must, perfectly clear, and which, as is the case of all acidulated liquids that have been boiled for a few seconds, remains uncontaminated although the curved neck of the flask containing them remain constantly open during several months or years.

"In a small quant.i.ty of water I washed a part of a bunch of grapes, the grapes and the stalks together, and the stalks separately. This washing was easily done by means of a small badger's-hair brush. The washing-water collected the dust upon the surface of the grapes and the stalks, and it was easily shown under the microscope that this water held in suspension a mult.i.tude of minute organisms closely resembling either fungoid spores, or those of alcoholic Yeast, or those of Mycoderma vini, etc. This being done, ten of the forty flasks were preserved for reference; in ten of the remainder, through the straight tube attached to each, some drops of the washing-water were introduced; in a third series of ten flasks a few drops of the same liquid were placed after it had been boiled; and, finally, in the ten remaining flasks were placed some drops of grape-juice taken from the inside of a perfect fruit. In order to carry out this experiment, the straight tube of each flask was drawn out into a fine and firm point in the lamp, and then curved. This fine and closed point was filed round near the end and inserted into the grape while resting upon some hard substance. When the point was felt to touch the support of the grape it was by a slight pressure broken off at the point file mark. Then, if care had been taken to create a slight vacuum in the flask, a drop of the juice of the grape got into it, the filed point was withdrawn, and the aperture immediately closed in the alcohol lamp. This decreased pressure of the atmosphere in the flask was obtained by the following means: After warming the sides of the flask either in the hands or in the lamp-flame, thus causing a small quant.i.ty of air to be driven out of the end of the curved neck, this end was closed in the lamp. After the flask was cooled, there was a tendency to suck in the drop of grape-juice in the manner just described.

"The drop of grape-juice which enters into the flask by this suction ordinarily remains in the curved part of the tube, so that to mix it with the must it was necessary to incline the flask so as to bring the must into contact with the juice and then replace the flask in its normal position. The four series of comparative experiments produced the following results:

"The first ten flasks containing the grape-must boiled in pure air did not show the production of any organism. The grape-must could possibly remain in them for an indefinite number of years. Those in the second series, containing the water in which the grapes had been washed separately and together, showed without exception an alcoholic fermentation which in several cases began to appear at the end of forty-eight hours when the experiment took place at ordinary summer temperature. At the same time that the yeast appeared, in the form of white traces, which little by little united themselves in the form of a deposit on the sides of all the flasks, there were seen to form little flakes of Mycellium, often as a single fungoid growth or in combination, these fungoid growths being quite independent of the must or of any alcoholic yeast. Often, also, the Mycoderma vini appeared after some days upon the surface of the liquid. The Vibria and the lactic ferments properly so called did not appear on account of the nature of the liquid.

"The third series of flasks, the washing-water in which had been previously boiled, remained unchanged, as in the first series. Those of the fourth series, in which was the juice of the interior of the grapes, remained equally free from change, although I was not always able, on account of the delicacy of the experiment, to eliminate every chance of error. These experiments cannot leave the least doubt in the mind as to the following facts:

"Grape-must, after heating, never ferments on contact with the air, when the air has been deprived of the germs which it ordinarily holds in a state of suspension.

"The boiled grape-must ferments when there is introduced into it a very small quant.i.ty of water in which the surface of the grapes or their stalks have been washed.

"The grape-must does not ferment when this washing-water has been boiled and afterwards cooled.

"The grape-must does not ferment when there is added to it a small quant.i.ty of the juice of the inside of the grape.

"The yeast, therefore, which causes the fermentation of the grapes in the vintage-tub comes from the outside and not from the inside of the grapes. Thus is destroyed the hypothesis of MM. Trecol and Fremy, who surmised that the alb.u.minous matter transformed itself into yeast on account of the vital germs which were natural to it. With greater reason, therefore, there is no longer any question of the theory of Liebig of the transformation of alb.u.minoid matter into ferments on account of the oxidation."

FOREIGN ORGANISMS AND THE WORT OF BEER

"The method which I have just followed," Pasteur continues, "in order to show that there exists a correlation between the diseases of beer and certain microscopic organisms leaves no room for doubt, it seems to me, in regard to the principles I am expounding.

"Every time that the microscope reveals in the leaven, and especially in the active yeast, the production of organisms foreign to the alcoholic yeast properly so called, the flavor of the beer leaves something to be desired, much or little, according to the abundance and the character of these little germs. Moreover, when a finished beer of good quality loses after a time its agreeable flavor and becomes sour, it can be easily shown that the alcoholic yeast deposited in the bottles or the casks, although originally pure, at least in appearance, is found to be contaminated gradually with these filiform or other ferments. All this can be deduced from the facts already given, but some critics may perhaps declare that these foreign ferments are the consequences of the diseased condition, itself produced by unknown causes.

"Although this gratuitous hypothesis may be difficult to uphold, I will endeavor to corroborate the preceding observations by a clearer method of investigation. This consists in showing that the beer never has any unpleasant taste in all cases when the alcoholic ferment properly so called is not mixed with foreign ferments; that it is the same in the case of wort, and that wort, liable to changes as it is, can be preserved unaltered if it is kept from those microscopic parasites which find in it a suitable nourishment and a field for growth.

"The employment of this second method has, moreover, the advantage of proving with certainty the proposition that I advanced at first--namely, that the germs of these organisms are derived from the dust of the atmosphere, carried about and deposited upon all objects, or scattered over the utensils and the materials used in a brewery-materials naturally charged with microscopic germs, and which the various operations in the store-rooms and the malt-house may multiply indefinitely.

"Let us take a gla.s.s flask with a long neck of from two hundred and fifty to three hundred cubic centimetres capacity, and place in it some wort, with or without hops, and then in the flame of a lamp draw out the neck of the flask to a fine point, afterwards heating the liquid until the steam comes out of the end of the neck. It can then be allowed to cool without any other precautions; but for additional safety there can be introduced into the little point a small wad of asbestos at the moment that the flame is withdrawn from beneath the flask. Before thus placing the asbestos it also can be pa.s.sed through the flame, as well as after it has been put into the end of the tube. The air which then first re-enters the flask will thus come into contact with the heated gla.s.s and the heated liquid, so as to destroy the vitality of any dust germs that may exist in the air. The air itself will re-enter very gradually, and slowly enough to enable any dust to be taken up by the drop of water which the air forces up the curvature of the tube. Ultimately the tube will be dry, but the re-entering of the air will be so slow that the particles of dust will fall upon the sides of the tube. The experiments show that with this kind of vessel, allowing free communication with the air, and the dust not being allowed to enter, the dust will not enter at all events for a period of ten or twelve years, which has been the longest period devoted to these trials; and the liquid, if it were naturally limpid, will not be in the least polluted neither on its surface nor in its ma.s.s, although the outside of the flask may become thickly coated with dust. This is a most irrefutable proof of the impossibility of dust getting inside the flask.

"The wort thus prepared remains uncontaminated indefinitely, in spite of its susceptibility to change when exposed to the air under conditions which allow it to gather the dusty particles which float in the atmosphere. It is the same in the case of urine, beef-tea, and grape-must, and generally with all those putrefactable and fermentable liquids which have the property when heated to boiling-point of destroying the vitality of dust germs."(7)