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In TIME for April 22, under "Medicine," is an article headed "Who Discovered Anesthesia?" The two groups best qualified to pass on the respective claims of the various contestants, namely the American Medical Association and the American Dental Association, decided that the honor of being called the discoverer of anesthesia was due Dr. Horace Wells, a dentist of Hartford, Conn. The American Dental Association voted this honor to Wells in 1864 and the American Medical Association did likewise in 1870.
May I call your attention to several errors in this article:
1) Horace Wells was not "Dazzled with hopes of a fortune. . . ." If he had been, he would have patented his discovery as he had patented two previous commercial discoveries, a coal sifter and a shower bath. When urged to patent this discovery, Wells declared, "No, let it be as free as the air we breathe."
2) Horace Wells did not have a patient die under an anesthetic.
3) Horace Wells became mentally deranged from self-experimentation, with chloroform, not from "brooding over his failure."
4) Nitrous oxide was reintroduced as an anesthetic agent by Gardner Q. Colton in the 1860s. It was not "forgotten until 1900."
5) Dr. William H. Welch did not believe "the real originator of anesthesia was Dentist William Thomas Green Morton. . . ." He gave that honor to Horace Wells.
6) Oliver Wendell Holmes did not "coin the word anesthesia." He suggested the word "anesthesia" and indicated in his letter the origin of this word and its definition. . . .
Most students of the history of anesthesia are convinced that it wasn't because Long was "Too modest to publish his early experiments" that "he laid his ether bottles aside." Crawford W. Long was simply not impressed with the fact that he had a great discovery in his hands, and so he "laid his ether bottles aside" until he read of Wm. T. G. Morton's work, and then three years after Morton's announcement he published his claim as the discoverer of anesthesia.
W. HARRY ARCHER, D.D.S.
Assistant Professor Dept. of Anesthesia & Exodontia University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pa. >-The fact about the discovery of anesthesia appears to be that there is much to be said on several sides.—ED.
A Bit Irritated
Sirs: A question concerning the make-up of your magazine (to which I have subscribed for some time) has recently puzzled me.
Why, in such columns as Milestones, p. 76 of the April 22 issue, and People, p. 56 of the same issue, are the cuts not surrounded by the material which is related to them? In Milestones, for instance, the picture of Mr. & Mrs. Jessel & Friend (thank God I wasn't asked to perform that marriage ceremony) is on one page—surrounded by Mr. & Mrs.
Douglas Fairbanks' new daughter, while the story related to the picture is mostly on the next page.
When I see a picture, I want to read the story with it right away—and it irritates me just a bit to have the adjacent printed matter deal with something totally different. . . .
REV. JOHN H. SHILLING Woodmere Methodist Church Detroit, Mich.
— How do other TIME readers feel?—ED.