1800-1950 / Benjamin Paul Blood

Benjamin Paul Blood's privately printed 1874 pamphlet, the source of the phrase "anaesthetic revelation." Hosted here is the section in which Blood, after nearly fourteen years of experiments with anaesthetics, describes the insight that comes at the moment of "coming to." William James reviewed the pamphlet that year and later quoted this passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Benjamin Paul Blood's last book, published in 1920, the year after his death, with an introduction by Horace Kallen. Hosted here is the opening of the final chapter, "The Anaesthetic Revelation," where Blood compares the anaesthetic insight to the trance cattle fall into at spilled blood and quotes James on the "artificial mystic state of mind."