On October 16, 1846, William T. G. Morton changed the world of medicine when he successfully sedated a patient before surgery. Using a homemade inhaler apparatus, Morton administered a large dose of gaseous ether to the patient, after which the surgeons went to work removing part of a tumor from his neck. The patient emerged from sedation and, when prompted to describe his level of pain, he said it felt as though his neck had been scratched. It was quite possibly the biggest leap forward in medicine ever achieved to that point. But what is more interesting about the event is what it shows us about the state of medical science just over a century ago.
William Morton was not a doctor. He began his medical career in dentistry, attending the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery for a couple of years before leaving without a diploma. After practicing dentistry for two years, he attempted to impress a girl by matriculating at Harvard Medical School. It was there he first learned of ether from his professor Charles Jackson, who demonstrated the chemical’s effectiveness at rendering people unconscious. Intrigued, Morton began experimenting with ether on his own, using it on himself and his dog, before growing confident enough to use it on a real patient. Somehow, he convinced a Boston merchant with tooth pain to allow him to administer ether and then painlessly extract the tooth. It was a success, and Morton decided he was ready to demonstrate this new technique on a larger scale.
Medicine at this time was decidedly more casual than it is today. Those pioneering new techniques would often experiment on willing live patients with little more than a hunch guiding their actions. J. Marion Sims, the inventor of a number of surgical techniques, was considered successful when only five of thirteen recipients of his ovariotomies - the complete removal an ovary - died following surgery. Joseph Lister was yet to make his contributions through the discovery that most surgical complication arose from uncleanliness in the surgical environment. This led to phenomena including surgeons leaving their garments unwashed and wearing stains as a badge of honor and indicator of experience. Given this state of medical care, it is easier to understand the mindset of a 19th century patient requiring surgery, and why these people were so willing to be guinea pigs; their outlooks with even conventional procedures was fairly grim, and so what harm could it bring to try something new?
When Morton, fresh from his successful painless tooth extraction, approached the dean of the Harvard Medical School, Dr. John Collins Warren, and described his ability to numb pain, the doctor was no doubt intrigued. An agreement was reached for Morton to attend a surgery in the Massachusetts General Hospital’s surgical theater and place a patient under anesthesia. It was entirely successful, and the world of medicine would quickly change. It is worth noting that there seemed to be no concern, from both the medical professionals performing the procedure and the patient receiving it, that Morton had no medical degree or qualifications. The idea of a painless surgery was so thrilling that any possibility at achieving it was worth a shot.
Pain was a very real component of any surgical plan before ether came around. When Sims performed his first ovariotomy, his patient alternated screaming and singing hymns to cope with the pain. The level of pain endured by these early patients, who had tumors removed and limbs sawed off, all while fully conscious, is truly unimaginable. Even beyond the pain, the thought of laying with a shroud covering your face and listening to the saw hacking through your own flesh and bone while feeling every movement of the instruments and smelling the acrid stench of the surgical suite is beyond understanding. Today, surgery can be life threatening and difficult, but rarely is the surgery itself traumatic for the patient. And this is thanks, at least in part, to the ether that Morton administered that day.
Word spread quickly of Morton’s ether induced anesthesia and physicians around the world began replicating the process. By December of the same year, just a couple of months after Morton’s first demonstration in Boston, ether was in use across the country and even in Europe. There was no testing process to ensure ether was safe with repeated use, or that it wasn’t carcinogenic or otherwise quietly dangerous. The benefits simply outweighed the risks.
While ether didn’t last long as the first choice anesthetic, it was seminal in the world of medicine. Within a few years of ether’s initial rise, chloroform, which caused the same sedation as ether but without the nasty side-effects of nausea and vomiting, began to displace Morton’s gas as the preferred anesthetic. Even still, Morton is respected throughout the medical world for bringing ether to the table - the surgical theater where that first anesthetized procedure was performed is called the Ether Dome. While the Wright Flyer wasn’t actually a very good plane, it nevertheless proved that we could fly, and gave us a design upon which to improve and advance. Much in the same way, ether promised a future with pain-free surgery, and enabled physicians to push medicine further and faster than ever before.
