LONG, Crawford W., physician, born in Danielsville, Madison County, Georgia, 1 November, 1815; died in Athens, Georgia, 16 June, 1878. He was graduated at Franklin college, Pennsylvania, in 1835, and at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1839. He then practised in Jefferson, Jackson County, Georgia, until 1851, when he removed to Athens, Georgia He claimed that he performed on 30 March, 1842, the first surgical operation with the patient in a state of anaesthesia from the inhalation of ether. In his history of the discovery of anaesthesia, Dr. J. Marion Sims says that Dr. Long was the first "to intentionally produce anaesthesia for surgical operations," and that this was done with sulphuric ether; that he did not by accident "hit upon it, but that he reasoned it out in a philosophical and logical manner" ; that "Horace Wells, without any knowledge of Dr. Long's labors, demonstrated in the same philosophic way (in his own person) the great principle of anaesthesia by the use of nitrous-oxide gas in December, 1844, thus giving Long the priority over Wells by two years and eight months, and over Morton, who followed Wells in 1846." He was named, with William T. G. Morton, Charles T. Jackson, and Wells, in a bill before the United States senate in 1854 to reward the probable discoverers of practical anesthesia. Dr. Long's contributions to medical literature relate chiefly to his discovery.
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