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Historical SummaryIN The YEAR 1846 William Thomas Green Morton was practicing dentistry in Tremont Row, Boston. Two years previously he had witnessed the dramatic failure of his dental partner, Horace Wells, to extract a tooth painlessly under nitrous oxide. One day some ether from a jar accidentally spilled on the floor. Morton, bending to wipe it up, inhaled the vapor, noted its benumbing effect, and observed: "I believe that I could have had a tooth extracted painlessly while in that condition." When in the course of the following month a patient named Eben Frost asked to be mesmerized for a tooth extraction, Morton had the patient inhale ether fumes, instead. The next day (October 1, 1846) the Boston Daily Journal carried the following story: "Last evening, as we were informed by a gentleman who witnessed the operation, an ulcerated tooth was extracted from the mouth of an individual without giving him the slightest pain. He was put into a kind of sleep, by inhaling a preparation, the effects of which lasted for about three-quarters of a minute, just long enough to extract the tooth." The great experiment was still ahead. On the morning of October 16th a group of Harvard medical students were gathered under the Bulfinch dome of the Massachusetts General Hospital, together with some of the top names in surgery, to watch Dr. John Collins Warren remove a vascular tumor from the left side of the neck of a painter named Gilbert Abbott. Morton administered ether, and the patient experienced no pain, merely the sensation of scraping with a blunt instrument. While Long, Wells, and Jackson all shared in the credit for the discovery, it was Morton who first publicly demonstrated the success of his method in operations on human beings. Morton chose the name "Leth-eon," but this did not satisfy Oliver Wendell Holmes, who proposed the word "Anaesthesia," which swept the medical world like wildfire. Morton’s later life was embittered by a torrent of controversy and litigation which reduced him to dire financial straits. Today he is recognized as one of the world’s greatest benefactors—the man who conquered pain. The excruciating agony of a surgical operation before anaesthesia was described in a letter written to Sir James Simpson (1811–70), a great authority on anaesthesia, by a member of the medical profession who had the misfortune to have a limb amputated before the introduction of Morton’s discovery (the first selection below). Morton’s great moment at the Massachusetts General Hospital was described by an eyewitness, Dr. Washington Ayer of San Francisco, for the Occidental Medical Times of March, 1896, and follows the letter to Sir James.
Key Quote"Gentlemen, this is no humbug."
Sir James Simpson
n.d.
The Conquest of Pain
[1846]
I
"I at once agreed to submit to the operation, but asked a week to prepare for it, not with the slightest expectation that the disease would take a favorable turn in the interval, or that the anticipated horrors of the operation would become less appalling by reflection upon them, but simply because it was so probable that the operation would be followed by a fatal issue that I wished to prepare for death, and what lies beyond it, whilst my faculties were clear and my emotions were comparatively undisturbed.
The week, so slow and yet so swift in its passage, at length came to an end, and the morning of the operation arrived. The operation was a more tedious one than some which involve much greater mutilation. It necessitated cruel curing through inflamed and morbidly sensitive parts, and could not be despatched by a few strokes of the knife.
Of the agony it occasioned I will say nothing. Suffering so great as I underwent cannot be expressed in words, and thus fortunately cannot be recalled. The particular pangs are now forgotten; but the blank whirlwind of emotion, the horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close upon despair, which swept though my mind and overwhelmed my heart, I can never forget, however gladly I would do so. Only the wish to save others some of my sufferings makes me deliberately recall and confess the anguish and humiliation of such a personal experience, nor can I find language more sober or familiar than that which I have used to express feelings which, happily for us all, are too rare as matters of general experience to have been shaped in the household words.
During the operation, in spite of the pain it occasioned, my senses were preternaturally acute, as I have been told they generally are in patients under such circumstances. I watched all that the surgeon did with a fascinated intensity.
I still recall with unwelcome vividness the spreading out of the instruments, the twisting of the tourniquet, the first incision, the fingering of the sawed bone, the sponge pressed on the flap, the tying of the blood vessels, the stitching of the skin, and the bloody dismembered limb lying on the floor. Those are not pleasant remembrances. For a long time they haunted me, and even now they are easily resuscitated; and though they cannot bring back the suffering attending the events which gave them a place in my memory, they can occasion a suffering of their own, and be the cause of a disquiet which favors neither mental nor bodily health.
Chicago: Sir James Simpson, ed., Memoirs in History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, ed. Louis Leo Snyder and Richard B. Morris (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Co., 1951), Original Sources, accessed May 2, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=6I61RQS37ANQ5N2.
MLA: . Memoirs, edited by Sir James Simpson, in History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, edited by Louis Leo Snyder and Richard B. Morris, Harrisburg, Pa., Stackpole Co., 1951, Original Sources. 2 May. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=6I61RQS37ANQ5N2.
Harvard: (ed.), Memoirs. cited in 1951, History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, ed. , Stackpole Co., Harrisburg, Pa.. Original Sources, retrieved 2 May 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=6I61RQS37ANQ5N2.
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