Historical Summary

IN The YEAR 1846 William Thomas Green Morton was practicing dentistry in Tremont Row, Boston. Two years previously he had witnessed the dramatic failure of his dental partner, Horace Wells, to extract a tooth painlessly under nitrous oxide. One day some ether from a jar accidentally spilled on the floor. Morton, bending to wipe it up, inhaled the vapor, noted its benumbing effect, and observed: "I believe that I could have had a tooth extracted painlessly while in that condition." When in the course of the following month a patient named Eben Frost asked to be mesmerized for a tooth extraction, Morton had the patient inhale ether fumes, instead. The next day (October 1, 1846) the Boston Daily Journal carried the following story:

"Last evening, as we were informed by a gentleman who witnessed the operation, an ulcerated tooth was extracted from the mouth of an individual without giving him the slightest pain. He was put into a kind of sleep, by inhaling a preparation, the effects of which lasted for about three-quarters of a minute, just long enough to extract the tooth."

The great experiment was still ahead. On the morning of October 16th a group of Harvard medical students were gathered under the Bulfinch dome of the Massachusetts General Hospital, together with some of the top names in surgery, to watch Dr. John Collins Warren remove a vascular tumor from the left side of the neck of a painter named Gilbert Abbott. Morton administered ether, and the patient experienced no pain, merely the sensation of scraping with a blunt instrument.

While Long, Wells, and Jackson all shared in the credit for the discovery, it was Morton who first publicly demonstrated the success of his method in operations on human beings. Morton chose the name "Leth-eon," but this did not satisfy Oliver Wendell Holmes, who proposed the word "Anaesthesia," which swept the medical world like wildfire. Morton’s later life was embittered by a torrent of controversy and litigation which reduced him to dire financial straits. Today he is recognized as one of the world’s greatest benefactors—the man who conquered pain.

The excruciating agony of a surgical operation before anaesthesia was described in a letter written to Sir James Simpson (1811–70), a great authority on anaesthesia, by a member of the medical profession who had the misfortune to have a limb amputated before the introduction of Morton’s discovery (the first selection below). Morton’s great moment at the Massachusetts General Hospital was described by an eyewitness, Dr. Washington Ayer of San Francisco, for the Occidental Medical Times of March, 1896, and follows the letter to Sir James.

Key Quote

"Gentlemen, this is no humbug."