ABSTRACT
The discovery of inhalation anaesthesia belongs to the extensive category of ‘multiple discoveries’, that is to say, discoveries made not once by a single person but at much the same time and in much the same form by several persons working quite independently. Clinical experiments in inhalation continued but produced no very significant or valuable results. Instead, the problem of anaesthesia in relation to surgery was clearly stated and solved after a fashion, by a young doctor in Shropshire, working on his own quite outside the mainstream of speculation and experiment; what he wrote and suggested, however, was completely ignored. Medical education in Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century was much better organised and more effective than in England. In the 1830s and 1840s approximately half its medical graduates were from Scotland, one-third from England, and the remainder from ‘the colonies’.
