The quest for Hickman.

Henry Hill Hickman (1800-1830), "the Rupert Brooke of anaesthesia",1 has a wellestablished place in medical history. A Shropshire general practitioner, who died young, he successfully carried out minor surgical procedures on animals rendered insensible by carbon dioxide and published his results in 1824 in a locally-printed pamphlet, which was reviewed unfavourably in the Lancet and Gentleman's Magazine. In 1828 he went to Paris in an attempt to interest the French medical establishment in his ideas but met with indifference. When ether anaesthesia was in the news in 1847, Hickman's work was remembered and noticed in both the English and French medical press, and thereafter he received regular passing mention in the literature, but by the early twentieth century he was no more than a name and the detailed records of his work were totally unknown. Credit for his rediscovery is due entirely to C J S Thompson (1862-1943), first Curator of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, who published an account of Hickman in the British Medical Journal in 1912 and secured the deposit of his papers, etc. in the Wellcome collection. Since then, Hickman's story has been frequently told. The centenary of his death in 1930 was the subject of a special exhibition at the Wellcome Museum, with a hardback souvenir catalogue, and there have been various later studies of his life and work.2 However, the story of Thompson's rediscovery has not yet been recounted. The starting point of Thompson's quest was undoubtedly a letter by Hickman's acquaintance, Thomas Dudley, of Kingswinford, published in the Lancet, 6 February 1847: