A Look Back at Practitioners Who Gave Us Anesthesia

One of the greatest benefits that scientists have wrested from nature for the benefit of humankind is anesthesia to take away the pain of surgery and tooth extraction. Julie M. Fenster, a columnist for American Heritage magazine, does a fine job of describing the emergence of anesthesia in America in the 1840s when the turbulent young republic was stretching its wings and expanding its reach.

The center of Fenster’s story is Boston, which could then claim to be a leader of the practice of medicine in this country and, in particular, Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811 and closely connected with Harvard Medical School. There, on Oct. 16, 1846, Dr. John C. Warren, of a famous Boston revolutionary family, operated on the first person ever to undergo surgery while anesthetized.

The patient was Gilbert Abbott, the problem was a tumor on his neck, and the agent that rendered him unconscious and insensible to pain was sulfuric ether, commonly called ether. When Warren addressed his audience in the operating theater that day, he said, “Gentlemen, this is no humbug!”

That day has been known in Boston, and especially at Massachusetts General, as “Ether Day.” With its partner, nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas,” and soon followed by chloroform, anesthesia quickly spread around the modernized world and would relieve the ghastly horrors of surgery without anesthesia, which Fenster describes in grisly detail.

Some clergymen opposed this new balm on the grounds that God meant men, and especially women in childbirth, to suffer pain. That argument lost its force after Queen Victoria asked for chloroform for the birth of her son, Leopold, in 1853. Before the invention of anesthesia, people undergoing painful operations tried liquor or opium to dull their senses, and they also tried the new practice of hypnotism, also known as Mesmerism, because it was invented by a Swiss named Franz Mesmer.

Mesmerism was awkward: It took a long time, and it didn’t always work. There was in the 1840s an air of humbug about Mesmerism, and also about the antecedents of anesthesia. (That word was coined, by the way, by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston physician, poet and wit, and father of the justice.)

Word of Warren’s first operation was carried swiftly by ship to England. There Dr. Robert Liston, a famous London surgeon, amputated a woman’s leg with the aid of ether on Dec. 21, 1846, and announced: “This Yankee dodge [clever plan], gentlemen, beats Mesmerism hollow!”

Ether had been used in the 1820s and 1830s, but not in the operating room: It was used by medical students as a kind of recreational drug, and the properties of nitrous oxide were presented at public exhibitions, where volunteers who inhaled it went silly and sometimes out of their heads. (One of these exhibitions was staged by Samuel Colt, who wanted to get enough money to produce the revolver he had invented.)

In fact, the man who brought ether and its delivery apparatus to Massachusetts General was a genuine American con man, William T.G. Morton. He was a dentist wanted for skipping his debts in several cities and known for trying to marry rich women. Morton, though, had audacity, and Fenster gives him credit for pushing ether when no one had before, though its beneficent properties were theoretically known.

A former dental partner of Morton’s, Horace Wells, who had been using nitrous oxide for extracting teeth, also claimed credit for the discovery of anesthesia, as did a brilliant Boston scientist, Charles T. Jackson, a brother-in-law of Ralph Waldo Emerson. They and their partisans fought for years over the discovery.

To Fenster, each deserved some credit. But her special hero seems to be Dr. John Warren, who had a reputation to lose if the experiment went wrong and who never much demanded praise for what he had done. The deaths of those who wanted the credit were unpleasant.

Wells died early of chloroform addiction. Jackson fell ill on the day he was to go to Emerson’s house in Concord for a family celebration and died, out of his mind, after seven years in McLean Asylum outside Boston. Morton died at 48 during a heat wave in New York--”not a great man at all,” Fenster writes, “but a man who had given the world a great discovery.”