Ether anesthesia is shown in public

At Massachusetts General Hospital, dentist William Morton gave ether to a patient so a surgeon could remove a neck tumor painlessly. The demonstration spread anesthesia around the world.

Context

The demonstration took place in the operating theatre now known as the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The patient was Gilbert Abbott, and the surgeon was John Collins Warren, who removed a tumour from the patient's neck while Morton administered the ether. The date, October 16, 1846, is well documented and is remembered at the hospital as Ether Day.

Morton was not the first to experiment with anaesthetic gases. Crawford Long in Georgia had used ether in surgery in 1842, and Horace Wells and others had tried nitrous oxide, but these uses were not widely publicised. The Boston demonstration, with a crowd of doctors watching, is the one that persuaded the medical world.

News travelled quickly, and ether was used in Britain within weeks. Priority disputes and arguments over patent rights troubled Morton for the rest of his life. Accounts also differ about how fully pain was prevented in the first case, so the story is best described as the public beginning of surgical anaesthesia rather than a flawless first trial.

Within a few years, anaesthesia changed surgery, allowing longer and more careful operations, and chloroform soon joined ether as another widely used agent.