observed the botanist Francis Darwin, son of Charles Darwin. William T. G. Morton’s tombstone reads, “Inventor and Revealer of Anesthetic Inhalation. Before Whom, in All Time, Surgery was Agony. By Whom Pain in Surgery was Averted and Annulled. Since Whom Science has Control of Pain.” Dr. Morton did not discover any new agents, but by persuading the medical establishment of ether’s utility during an operation at Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846, he bifurcated medical history forever.During the 1840s at least three Americans were experimenting with ether and nitrous oxide: among them, two New England dentists and a southern country doctor. That one of the two dentists ultimately prevailed has sometimes been attributed to the economics of dentistry; unlike most surgeries, dentistry was usually elective, and the fear of pain kept patients away from it. (But, like the idea that anesthesia could only have been invented in America, this theory seems puzzling. After all, even if the surgical profession as a whole maintained a cultural bias against anesthesia, it would have taken only one surgeon to play Morton’s role.)The earliest of the three is generally believed to be a doctor from Georgia who, after attending ether parties as a medical student, experimented with using ether during surgery on a patient in 1842.
