Crawford Williamson Long was an American surgeon and anesthesiologist.
Background
Crawford Williamson Long, the son of James Long, a cultivated Southerner, by his wife Elizabeth Ware, was born in Danielsville, Georgia, United States. His grandfather, Captain Samuel Long, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian born in the province of Ulster, settled in Pennsylvania about 1761 and later fought in the War of the Revolution.
Education
Crawford Long, who as a boy was studious, entered Franklin College (now the University of Georgia) at the early age of fourteen and was graduated in 1835, second in his class. He began to read medicine, first under a preceptor, later at Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, and finally, in 1838, at the University of Pennsylvania, where in 1839 he received his medical degree.
Career
Long started his career as a teacher in the academy which his father had founded at Danielsville. He then spent eighteen months in New York, where he gained the reputation of being a skilful surgeon. In 1841, owing to family difficulties, he was forced to return to Georgia and began to practise in the isolated village of Jefferson, Jackson County, where he obtained the clientele of his old preceptor, Dr. Grant. During idle moments and during horseback rides in the country necessitated by his rural practice Long read widely in general literature, developing a particular fondness for Shakespeare and Dickens.
In the early forties the exhilarating effect of laughing gas was a subject much under discussion, and wandering charlatans gave demonstrations of its action to voluntary subjects. In January 1842, after witnessing such a demonstration, several of Long's friends induced him to permit them to have a "nitrous oxide frolic" in his room. Unfortunately no nitrous oxide was available, but Long offered a substitute. Telling of the incident later, he said: "I informed them . .. that I had a medicine (sulphuric ether) which would produce equally exhilarating effects; that I had inhaled it myself, and considered it as safe as the nitrous oxide gas". The young men inhaled the volatile gas and became hilarious, and many received more or less severe bruises. Long made the shrewd observation that the bruises were unaccompanied by pain; from this observation he inferred that ether must have the power of producing insensibility, and he decided to test it in his surgical practice.
A few months later (March 30, 1842) he administered sulphuric ether to a patient, James Venable, who, when completely anesthetized, had removed from the back of his neck a small cystic tumor. This patient later testified that he experienced no pain, and a second operation, involving the removal of another similar tumor from the same man's neck, was performed by Long on June 6, 1842. On July 3, 1842, he amputated the toe of a negro boy named Jack and on September 9, 1843, he removed an encysted tumor from the head of Mrs. Mary Vincent. A fifth operation, the amputation of a finger, was carried out Jan. 8, 1845. Three other operations were performed before September 1846, making a total of eight.
His experience with ether was not published, however, until December 1849, when, as a result of the controversy that had arisen over the claims of W. T. G. Morton, Long described his first five operations in a short paper contributed to the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal, under the title, "An Account of the First Use of Sulphuric Ether by Inhalation as an Anesthetic in Surgical Operations". His apologia for his delay in publication may best be given in his own words: "I was anxious before making my publication, to try etherization in a sufficient number of cases to fully satisfy my mind that an'sthesia was produced by the ether, and was not the effect of the imagination, or owing to any peculiar insusceptibility to pain in the person experimented on . I determined to wait and see whether any surgeon would present a claim to having used ether by inhalation in surgical operations prior to the time it was used by me. "
His claim was issued in modest terms, but, as Doctor W. H. Welch has remarked, "Long is necessarily deprived of the larger honor which would have been his due had he not delayed publication of experiments with ether until several years after the universal acceptance of surgical an'sthesia. . We need not withhold from Dr. Long the credit of independent and prior experiment and discovery, but we cannot assign to him any influence upon the historical development of our knowledge of surgical an'sthesia or any share in its introduction to the world at large". He was ever modest in urging his claims, but in the year before his death, Doctor J. Marion Sims published in the Virginia Medical Monthly (May 1877) a paper recalling Long's statement made in 1849 and declared him to be the "first discoverer of anesthesia. " In 1850 Long removed to Athens, Georgia, where he immediately acquired a large surgical practice. In June 1878 he died in that city.
Achievements
Connections
On August 11, 1842, Long married Caroline Swain, niece of Governor David Lowry Swain of North Carolina.