Surgeons painlessly operated under ether for the first time in public
On this day · 16 October 1846
In a Boston amphitheater, a patient slept through surgery as ether vapor banished pain and rewrote what an operation could be.
On 16 October 1846, in the surgical amphitheater of Massachusetts General Hospital — now known as the Ether Dome — a Boston dentist named William T. G. Morton administered sulfuric ether to a patient before a crowd of skeptical physicians. As the man breathed vapor from a soaked sponge, surgeon John Collins Warren cut into his neck to remove a tumor.
The patient, housepainter Edward Gilbert Abbott, lay motionless and felt no pain. Turning to the watching doctors, Warren reportedly declared:
“Gentlemen, this is no humbug.”
Until that morning, surgery meant being held down and enduring agony fully awake. The public proof that inhaled anesthesia could erase that pain spread within weeks across America and Europe, transforming the operating room. The day is widely marked as the birth of modern anesthesiology.
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