In 1802, Sally Cary Fairfax1, wife of George William Fairfax2, formerly of Belvior Plantation and living in England, wrote to her American nephew, Henry, relating a family conflict that had occurred nearly fifty years earlier. In 1757, George William Fairfax, had undertaken a voyage to England to assist in the settlement of his deceased grandmother’s estate. His grandmother, the late Anne Harrison Fairfax’s3 worldly goods and properties were to be conferred upon her eldest son, also named Henry4. Sally, who had been living in Bath and Yorkshire since 1773, remarked that Henry5, her uncle would have left the estate to his nephew George William, eldest son of his brother William Fairfax6 of Belvoir, “but from an impression that my husband's [George William’s] mother [Sarah Walker7] was a black woman, if my Fairfax had not come over to see his uncle and convinced him that he was not a negroe's son…

Throughout history doctors have tried many different ways to dull the pain of surgery, from freezing parts of the body to numb the pain, when ice was available; to pressing sponges to patients’ noses that had been soaked in such sedatives as mandragora, henbane and opium. There were few analgesics (painkillers) and no functional anesthetics to speak of until the 1840s. This was the specter of surgery before October 16, 1846, a day that revolutionized the medical field.