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 it got in the newspapers. Just 16 days after he first used ether on a dental patient, Morton put a surgical patient under for Dr. John Warren in a well-attended demonstration at Mass. General. Unlike the failed nitrous oxide experiment of the year before, this was a resounding success.

Edward Abbot, the 20-year-old who had just had a congenital vascular formation removed from his neck, told those assembled, "I did not experience pain at any time, though I knew that the operation was proceeding."

Surgeon Warren declared, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." Another of the surgeons, Henry Bigelow, published the procedure in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal a few weeks later on Nov. 18. (Dr. Long did not publish his results until 1848.)

At the urging of the son of a patent commissioner, Morton and Jackson applied for a patent Oct. 27, 1846, and it was granted a swift 16 days later on Nov. 12. They called their anesthetic Letheon and tried to keep the formula secret. That drew angry protests from much of the medical profession. Soon, however, doctors identified the gas by its distinct smell.

Morton tried petitioning Congress for money to compensate him for the widespread use of "his" discovery. Despite two decades of campaigning, he got nothing, and he died in poverty at age 49 on July 15, 1868.

Source: The Unusual History of Ether