This was first published in 1849, but two years earlier he had described and illustrated a regulating device that he had devised for some early experiments (with Liston and other surgeons) involving the use of ether in surgery. This appeared first in 1847 in the London Medical Gazette and was re-issued twice in that same year, both as an offprint and separate printed by John Churchill.
It was a copy of the Churchill edition, On the Inhalation of the Vapour of Ether..., which should contain one full-page and two smaller wood engravings, that made £2200 in a June 4 sale held byMallams of Oxford. An 1858 [first?] edition of a comprehensive treatise on anaesthesiology that Snow completed just a few days before his death and which was edited for publication as On Chloroform and other Anaesthetics, was lotted up with 11 other later works and rather undervalued at £100-200, but brought £1900 all the same. A related 18th century work, Edmund Goodwyn's The Connexion of Life with Respiration of 1788, made £500.
Literary entries in this 525-lot sale included an 1889 first of W.B. Yeats' The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems that sold at £760 and a 1902 Als from Yeats, referring to his play Where There is Nothing, which reached £750. What appears to have been a job lot of books by or about Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo - the only named Rolfe being an 1898 first of How I was Buried Alive (a story printed in Wide World Magazine) - sold for a much, much higher than expected £1650, as did a "quantity of leaflets and pamphlets, some signed", at £1300.
