Excerpt from Pain and Anaesthetics: An Essay, Introductory to a Series of Surgical and Medical Monographs Pain humbles the proudest and subdues the strongest. It was the great agent of the Spanish inquisition, because it was more effective to extort confession than death itself. It was pain that made Caesar weep, and I have seen the most heroic and stout-hearted men shed tears like a child, when enduring the anguish of neuralgia. As in a powerful engine when the director turns some little key, and the monster is at once aroused, and plunges along the pathway, screaming and breathing forth flames in the majesty of his power, so the hero of a hundred battles, if perchance a filament of nerve is compressed, is seized with spasms, and struggles to escape the unendurable agony. We have then this the first reason for the use of anaesthetics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.