general anaesthesia came from experiments made on man
alone. There is no suspicion of any experiment on a lower animal in
connection with it.... On the contrary, there is a most notable fact
in relation to experiments under chloroform made on lower animals,
which suggests that if they had ever been relied on,--chloroform would
never have been introduced into practice. Flourens, the eminent
French physiologist, tried the effect of chloroform on inferior
animals, and in consequence of its powerful and fatal influence on
them, put it aside as an anaesthetic.
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There are methods of producing local insensibility to pain which have
been tried, and which deserve notice.

In 1862, I made an attempt to carry out local anaesthesia by
exhaustion of blood from a part. I noticed that when three round
cupping-glasses were applied to the body very close to each other, the
clear triangular space left free within the rim of the mouths of the
glasses was rendered white, brawny-like and insensible, when the
suction of the glasses was complete. This was obviously due to the
local abstraction of blood from the part; and I thought, consequently,
that if I could exhaust the blood from the extremity of a limb, the
exhausted part might be operated upon without pain.... I tried the
process on myself, and finding it succeed, the operation of removing
the nail of the greta toe, was tried on a patient, quite painlessly,
the patient looking on and feeling nothing. But the proceeding was
too long and cumbersome to admit of introduction into practice
generally, though it indicated an important principle which may in
some future day be utilized. In this research, no experiment on a
lower animal was resorted to; I was myself the victim in all
preliminary experiments.
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The most numerous and extensive efforts for local anaesthesia have
been those in which extreme cold has been employed to produce the
benumbing effect. The earliest applications of cold originated
between two and three hundred years ago in the fencing schools of
Naples. A Neapolitan professor of training placed crushed ice in a
flash of thin glass, and then applied the chilled glass to the skin,
and held it there until the skin was frozen, in order that the
cautery could be employed, or other small operations performed without
the infliction of pain. The proceeding must have been most
succ