Lister died in February, 1912, and by his wish he was laid to rest by the side of his wife in West Hampstead Cemetery. An impressive funeral service was, however, held at Westminster Abbey; and at it an anthem was sung composed for the funeral of Queen Caroline, in 1737, and chosen for the special appropriateness of the words, which were:

When the ear heard him, then it blessed him; and when the eye saw him, it gave witness of him. He delivered the poor that cried; the fatherless and him that had none to help him. Kindness, meekness, and comfort were in his tongue. If there was any virtue, and if there was any praise, he thought on those things. His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth ever

more.

Pasteur's experiments on dogs, which led to the discovery of a remedy for rabies, and most of the operations performed by Lister and his successors, would not have been possible without the use of chloroform. Anæsthesia is the handmaid of surgery; it permitted many new departures and rendered operations feasible which had been undreamed of before. Pasteur had a great horror of useless suffering, and always insisted upon anasthesia before undertaking the trephinings which his experiments involved. It is essential that conscious pain should be avoided in all such operations, whether on animals or man. The anguish endured by patients undergoing operations before the days of anesthetics has been vividly described by Dr. George Wilson. Dr. Wilson had to undergo the protracted and painful experience of having one foot removed by surgeons.

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'During the operation,” he says, “in spite of the pain it occasioned, my senses were preternaturally acute. I watched all that the surgeons did with a fascinated intensity. Of the agony it occasioned, I will say nothing. Suffering so great as I underwent cannot be expressed in words, and thus fortunately

cannot be recalled. The particular pangs are now forgotten; but the black whirlwind of emotion, the horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close upon despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my heart, I can never forget, however gladly I would do so."

Now, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes: "The fierce extremity of suffering has been steeped in the waters of forgetfulness, and the deepest furrow in the knotted brow of agony has been smoothed for ever."

The bust of Sir James Young Simpson in Westminster Abbey bears the inscription: "To whose Genius and Benevolence the world owes the Blessings derived from the Use of Chloroform for the Relief of Suffering." When a young medical student, Simpson was so greatly distressed by the groans of a woman under an operation that he thought of relinquishing his career for work in which he would not meet so much suffering. After reflection, however, he decided to continue his studies. with the problem ever on his heart and mind how the pains to which humanity is subject could be relieved. When lecturing to his students in later years, he never wearied in insisting that "the proud mission of the physician is distinctly twofold-viz., to alleviate human suffering as well as to preserve human life." It was this noble motive which made him eager to adopt any method of surgical anæsthesia and to carry on systematic experiments and inquiries with the object of finding an aid to painless surgery.

Before Simpson proved the power of chloroform to put man into a deep sleep, several anesthetics had been used for this purpose. While working at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol near the end of the eighteenth century, Sir Humphry Davy discovered the intoxicating and stupefying action of nitrous oxide, and suggested

its use in surgical operations. Nearly half a century later Dr. Horace Wells, an American dentist, had one of his upper teeth extracted without any pain after deeply breathing this gas. A later experiment at the Boston Medical School and Hospital was, however, unsuccessful owing to an insufficient quantity of the gas being used, and the failure appears to have discouraged Dr. Wells. His former pupil and partner, Dr. W. T. G. Morton, of Boston, then took up the subject, and was led to the use of sulphuric ether as an anesthetic. In September, 1846, he extracted a tooth without pain while the patient was breathing sulphuric ether, and in the following month a severe operation was performed painlessly under the gas at the Boston Hospital.

More than four years earlier, in March, 1842, Dr. C. W. Long, then of Jefferson, Jackson County, U.S.A., had used sulphuric ether as an anesthetic during minor operations, but he took no steps to make his discovery known, and the new era in anesthetics and in surgery opened with Dr. Morton's work. Within a few weeks. the vapour of sulphuric ether had been used successfully in several other cases of surgical operation in Boston. So soon as the news reached Edinburgh, Simpson was eager to prove the virtue of the new anodyne to relieve the agonising pains of women in travail. He entered the field immediately, and, selecting a difficult case for experiment, proved in January, 1847, that the sufferings of the mother during childbirth could be alleviated by the inhalation of ether-vapour, and that the use of the anesthetic was not injurious to the child.

Simpson was not satisfied, however, that sulphuric ether was the best agent for producing anesthesia. He obtained a number of other volatile liquids, and tested them systematically with the object of finding an anodyne

as potent as ether but less irritating and disagreeable to the patient. With his two assistants, Dr. Keith and Dr. Duncan, he tried the effect of various liquids night after night, though the tests were not without great risk to the experimenters. The discovery of the power of chloroform has been told dramatically by Prof. Miller :

Late one evening-it was the 4th of November, 1847-on returning home after a weary day's labour, Dr. Simpson, with his two friends and assistants, Drs. Keith and J. M. Duncan, sat down to their somewhat hazardous work in Dr. Simpson's dining-room. Having inhaled several substances, but without much effect, it occurred to Dr. Simpson to try a ponderous - material, which he had formerly set aside on a lumber-table, and which, on account of its great weight, he had hitherto regarded as of no likelihood whatever. This happened to be a small bottle of chloroform. It was searched for and recovered from beneath a heap of waste paper. And, with each tumbler newly charged, the inhalers resumed their vocation. Immediately an unwonted hilarity seized the party, they became brighteyed, very happy and very loquacious-expatiating on the delicious aroma of the new fluid. . . . But suddenly there was a talk of sounds being heard like those of a cotton-mill, louder and louder; a moment more, then all was quiet, and then-a crash. On awakening, Dr. Simpson's first perception was mental -"This is far stronger and better than ether," said he to himself. His second was, to note that he was prostrate on the floor, and that among the friends about him there was both confusion and alarm.

The inhalation of chloroform was repeated many times that night, and ten days later, Simpson was able to announce that he had administered the anesthetic to about fifty individuals “without the slightest bad result of any kind.". Much opposition was at first offered to the use of chloroform in childbirth, largely upon the grounds of the penalty pronounced upon Eve for her transgression in the Garden of Eden-" in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children,"-but it was met with the

apt reply by Simpson that "the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam" before taking a rib from him to make a woman for his mate. It was not, however, until Queen Victoria had herself taken chloroform during a confinement that the clamour of a section of the clergy began to give way before the voice of wisdom and experience.

It is difficult to understand the mind that seeks for Biblical justification of scientific achievement or application. People who manifest it are like those of the Middle Ages who attributed all disease to some special outpourings of divine wrath on account of human iniquities, and looked for relief from it to prayer instead of works. In this way was the Black Death, or plague, .regarded in medieval times, and only in 1894 was its cause discovered by two Japanese doctors, Yersin and Kitasato, to be a particular parasite which grows in bodies of rats and like animals. The disease is conveyed from rats to human beings by the bites of fleas which have fed upon the blood of rats containing the parasite. For three thousand years "the pestilence that walketh in darkness" took its toll of human beings without being discovered, but now that its true nature is known the human race has in its own hands the means of emancipation from the disease. The chain which connects microbe and man in the plague-stricken has been revealed, and by breaking it humanity can be delivered from a thraldom under which it has groaned for unknown ages.

A few years ago mosquitoes, flies, ticks, fleas and related biting and blood-sucking insects, were considered by most people to be unworthy objects of serious study, but it is now known that they are most important factors in the spread of various diseases, especially in tropical countries, It has been established by many