I went to Doctor Jackson, told him what I had done, and asked him to give me a certificate that ether was harmless in its effects. This he positively refused to do. I then told him I should go to the principal surgeons and have the question thoroughly tried. I then called on Doctor Warren, who promised me an early opportunity to try the experiment, and soon after I received the invitation ..Now as these are both ex parte statements, and as there are no witnesses on either side, according to the rule we have already established, they will both have to be eliminated.1 Doctor Morton, however, says previously that it was Doctor Hayward with whom he consulted as to the best method of bringing his discovery before the world. In the consideration of this subject we come upon a man of rare character-rare even in his profession. Dr. John C. Warren was the perfect type of an Anglo-Saxon surgeon. His courage and dexterity were fully equalled by his kindness and sympathy for the patient. Cool and collected in the most trying emergencies, it has been said of him that he never performed a capital operation without feeling a
[316]
is substantially Doctor Jackson's own statement.
Doctor Morton gave a wholly different account before the Congressional Committee of 1852.
He said:
1 The Congressional Committee of 1852 did not find Doctor Jackson's report of this interview trustworthy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.