A Boston dentist made surgery painless, then tried to patent it.
On 16 October 1846, in a Boston operating theatre, William Morton had a patient inhale ether before a surgeon cut a tumour from his neck. The man felt no pain, and the news crossed the Atlantic within weeks. Morton then disguised the gas as 'Letheon' and patented it.
Morton was a Boston dentist who had learned about ether's effects from the physician and chemist Charles T. Jackson while briefly studying at Harvard Medical School. On 30 September 1846 he gave ether to a patient, Ebenezer Frost, and pulled a tooth without pain. A favourable newspaper report reached the surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow, who arranged a public trial at Massachusetts General Hospital.
On 16 October, with Morton giving the ether, the surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumour from the neck of a patient named Edward Gilbert Abbott, painlessly. The room became known as the Ether Dome and is preserved to this day. Before long ether was being used in London too, first by a dentist pulling a tooth. The demonstration is widely credited with winning the medical world over to surgical anaesthesia, which made much of modern surgery possible.
Morton's conduct afterwards was less admirable. He tried to conceal what the gas was, calling it 'Letheon', and secured a patent a month later, although by then it was widely known to be ordinary ether. Doctors condemned the move and the patent was never enforced. He spent years asking Congress for a $100,000 reward, but his case was tangled with rival claims from Jackson and from his former partner Horace Wells, who had experimented with nitrous oxide. Every application failed.
The question of credit has never been settled. A Georgia surgeon, Crawford Long, had operated under ether in 1842 but did not publish until 1849. Boston's Ether Monument dodges the quarrel by depicting a robed, turbaned doctor who represents none of the claimants. Morton later gave ether to more than two thousand wounded soldiers in the American Civil War. He died in 1868; his widow said three medals were all he ever received for his work.
Source: Wikipedia — William T. G. Morton · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
