8vo; 165 pages. Engraved frontispiece portrait of Horace Wells.

"Senator Truman Smith of Connecticut in the 1850s championed Horace Wells's claim in Congress and, as a means of documenting it, compiled the Congressional report, An Examination of the Question of Anaesthesia.... In 1867, Smith rewrote the work and published it in its final edition under the abbreviated title, An Inquiry into the Origin of Anaesthesia. While the 1858 and 1859 editions are, like the original report, mainly documentary, the 1867 edition is written descriptively, although incorporating most of the information contained in the earlier editions, but with some new material as well." Richard Wolfe, I Awaken to Glory: Essays Celebrating Horace Wells, (1994), p 60.

This is the definitive summary of the senator for Connecticut's argument in favor of the roles that Horace Wells and William T. G. Morton played in the discovery of anesthesia. Fulton-Stanton III.23. Sim, Heritage of Anesthesia, p 29.