I would like to be asleep for this

The surgeon says he is quick. The surgeon is proud of being quick. — Patient, 1843

Before 1846, a surgeon couldn't put you to sleep. The best he could do was hurry, so the good ones were fast and proud of it. In 1845 a dentist tried to show off a painkiller at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the crowd laughed him out of the room. The next year another dentist, William Morton, came to the same hospital with ether and put a patient under. He'd mixed in some orange oil, called it Letheon and patented it. It was still ether. A new name doesn't change what's in the bottle.

Still bugs us: the bill.

The full file

Morton had been beaten to it by four years. In March 1842, in Jefferson, Georgia, a doctor named Crawford Long cut a tumor out of the neck of a medical student, James Venable, who had breathed ether and felt nothing. Long got the idea at ether frolics, parties where people inhaled ether for fun and felt nothing when they fell. He waited until 1849 to publish. By then the credit had been fought over for more than two years by Morton, Horace Wells and a Boston chemist named Charles Jackson.

The fight went badly for everyone in it. Wells, the dentist who had been jeered in 1845, started testing chloroform on himself. In January 1848 he was arrested in New York for throwing acid at two women, and three days later he killed himself in his cell. A letter making him an honorary member of the Paris Medical Society was already on its way.

Morton's patent never paid him anything. He asked Congress for compensation for years and died in 1868, at 48, still asking.

His gravestone calls him the "Inventor and Revealer of Anesthetic Inhalation." The same year he died, Boston put up a monument to ether anesthesia in the Public Garden. It names no one.

Relates to No. 00100.