Dentist William Morton uses ether to anesthetize a patient in Boston. It was not the first use, but it led to the widespread adoption of ether for surgical anesthesia.
Dr. Crawford Long of Jefferson, Georgia, removed a tumor from a patient’s neck under ether anesthesia in 1842, but he didn’t publish his results until 1848.
Pre-med student Morton was practicing dentistry in Boston, apparently without the benefit of a formal dental education. In 1845, he’d arranged a demonstration of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, as an anesthetic. It failed, perhaps because he didn’t use enough gas. Morton and his tutor Charles Jackson tried a different gas, ether. Morton secretly experimented on small animals and himself at home. Then, on September 30, 1846, he used ether to painlessly extract a tooth from Eben Frost.
Word spread. Then it got in the newspapers. Just sixteen days after ether’s first dental use, Morton anesthetized a surgical patient for John Warren in a well-attended demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital. Afterward, the patient, who’d just had a congenital vascular formation removed from his neck, announced, “I did not experience pain at any time, though I knew that the operation was proceeding.”
Surgeon Warren declared, “Gentlemen, this is no humbug.” Surgeon Henry Bigelow published the procedure in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal on November 18.
Morton and Jackson applied for a patent on October 27, and it was granted a swift sixteen days later. They called their anesthetic Letheon and tried to keep the formula secret. That drew angry protests from the medical profession, but doctors soon identified ether’s distinct smell.
For two decades, Morton petitioned Congress to compensate him for the widespread use of “his” discovery. Nada. He died in poverty at age forty-nine in 1868.—RA