Ether Day 1846: the first successful public anesthetic

The first successful public demonstration of surgery under ether anesthesia took place on 16 October 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, in the operating theatre now called the Ether Dome. Dentist William T. G. Morton gave sulfuric ether to patient Edward Gilbert Abbott, and surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumor from his neck.

Abbott breathed the vapor from an ether-soaked sponge in a glass inhaler. He muttered occasionally but barely stirred through a three-inch incision beneath his jaw, and on waking told the skeptical audience he had felt no pain. Warren turned to the room and said: “Gentlemen, this is no humbug.” One medical historian calls it a fitting riposte to a letter in The Lancet twenty years earlier, headed “Surgical Humbug”, that had mocked English doctor Henry Hickman’s attempts at painless surgery. That evening, Warren noted the “interesting operation” in his journal.

It was not the first use of anesthesia. Georgia physician Crawford Long had operated under ether in 1842 but did not publish until 1849, and in January 1845 dentist Horace Wells tried nitrous oxide in the same hospital, only for the patient to cry out. Morton’s achievement was doing it in public, before the doctors who would spread it.

What happened next

• 17 October 1846: Scientific American ran the first nationally circulated article on Morton’s ether, written too early to include the operation.
• Within days: the popular press hailed it as the “greatest gift ever made to suffering humanity”.
• Later: physician-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. coined the word “anesthesia”.
• Within ten weeks: ether was in use at University College London, where surgeon Robert Liston declared that “this Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow”.

Morton went on to claim sole credit for inventing anesthesia, a claim the details above do not support.