On chloroform and other anaesthetics : their action and administration / by John Snow ; edited, with a memoir of the author, by Benjamin W. Richardson.

  • Snow, John, 1813-1858.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On chloroform and other anaesthetics : their action and administration / by John Snow ; edited, with a memoir of the author, by Benjamin W. Richardson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    to the water of popular ignorance concerning life and its laws. For, to be the idol of the people in physic, is too often to be the Juggernaut of physic, —an idol of wood or of stone in showy gold and tinsel. This idol has neither sense nor force ; if it had, it were not an idol; it would walk off, or tell the worshippers no longer to shake hands constantly with themselves in its presence. But, when the opportunity offered for obtaining re- munerative practice by the exercise of his scientific skill, Snow showed himself, both in act and industry, competent for success. He soon overcame all difficul- ties, and managed by his frugality to lay in store for a rainy day for himself, and to help such friends as needed. Many rumours as to the extent of his gains abound which it is right to correct. His income of late years was near £1,000 a year, but it never exceeded that sum. For this, he exhibited chloroform or one or other anaesthetic about four hundred and fifty times annually, taking an average of the ten years preceding his death. In a large number of these cases, however, his services were gratuitously sup- plied. In his private relations, Dr. Snow was a man of the strictest integrity and purest honour. The ex- periences of life, instead of entwining about him the vices of the world, had weaned him from the world. Without any pretence, maintaining no connection with sect or party, living by the rules of the eternal laws which, according to the best of his abilities, he could read from the universe, he carried out a prac- tical religion, independently of any hypothesis or abstruse profession, which few professors could ap- proach. A child of nature, he knew no way of recognizing the Divine influences so purely as in silent and inexpressible admiration of those.grand external phenomena which pharisees see not, but which each moment convey to men of his character,