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Www.Wired.Com - 1846: Dentist William Morton uses ether to anesthetize a patient in Boston. It was not the first such use, but it began a train of events leading to the widespread adoption of ether for surgical anesthesia.
Dr. Crawford Long of Jefferson, Georgia, removed a tumor from the neck of James Venable under ether anesthesia on March 30, 1842. (Long may have started using ether a year earlier while he was attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.) But Dr. Long, perhaps giddy with excitement or perhaps giddy from experimenting with ether as a recreational drug (the "ether frolics"), did not rush to publish or patent his discovery.
Dr. Morton was a pre-med student, who was practicing dentistry in Boston apparently without the benefit of a formal dental education. He had arranged in 1845 for his dental mentor and former dentistry partner Horace Wells to demonstrate the use of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, as an anesthetic. The demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital was a failure, caused perhaps by not using enough gas.
Wells left Boston, but Morton and his pre-med tutor, Dr. Charles Jackson, both followed up by trying a different gas, ether. Morton secretly experimented on small animals and himself at his home in nearby West Needham. Then, in his Boston dental office at 9 in the evening, Sept. 30, 1846, Morton used ether to painlessly extract a tooth from Eben Frost, a local merchant.
Morton continued the use of ether, and word spread. Then...
Wired.com
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