In summary, the relatively minor operation on Abbott, and his appearance of suffering during the operation, regardless of his subsequent denial of experiencing any pain, does not appear to be a demonstration that could be considered unequivocally successful, or warrant an emphatic proclamation of success.
In addition, Warren was described by his brother as habitually cautious. In —, extensive statements on the ether controversy were prepared for submission to the U. Gould assisted Morton in designing the ether inhaler that was used on October 16, Transcript of part of the testimony of Augustus Addison Gould, M.
Congress in page Townsend, a senior surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, did not report any proclamation by Warren. Two authors, Benjamin Eddy Cotting, M. Moreover, Cotting and Bemis have not been previously identified by anesthesia historians as witnesses. Six eyewitness accounts were published by four physicians who were medical students in Boston in Description by Isaac Francis Galloupe, M.
The conflated narratives include memories of other operations which were attended and information from secondary accounts of the history of anesthesia. Several eyewitnesses stated that Abbott lay on an operating table. In , Daniel Denison Slade, M. Clearly, Slade did not intend to describe the operation on Gilbert Abbott in detail, and there was no assertion in his article that he witnessed the operation.
Nevertheless, in , Bemis identified Slade as a witness. Early in , Washington Ayer, M. Ayer believed he was possibly the only living witness of the first operation under ether at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The exhibition of the anesthetic was admitted by those present to be a complete success. Davis incorrectly placed the surgeon George Hayward, M. Benjamin Eddy Cotting, M. In , Charles Vose Bemis, M. According to Bemis, the patient was on an operating table. Isaac Francis Galloupe, M. A hitherto unknown article by Galloupe in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 27 confirms that he was present on October 16, , at the operation on Abbott.
Galloupe was the only eyewitness to report that Warren had become tearful. Galloupe named six surgeons who were present: J.
Mason Warren, M. Tappan Eustis Francis, M. Although Francis is not known to have published any recollections of that historic day, some of his remarks at an Ether Day commemoration at Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, , have been documented. The remaining eyewitnesses of the operation on Abbott comprise a small number of identified witnesses, who are not known to have made public statements regarding the operation, and an unknown number of unidentified witnesses.
An unknown number of eyewitnesses, comprising medical students, physicians, and ward attendants, have not been identified because they have not made statements that could have placed them at the Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, The anonymous author of the article in the Christian Watchman provided brief descriptions of the operations performed under ether on October 16 and 17, In January , Horace Wells —, dentist, Hartford, Connecticut failed to convince observers mainly medical students in Boston of the anodyne properties of nitrous oxide.
In , Wells published his only pamphlet on anesthesia. It is a humbug , and it is reckless in Morton to use it as he does. Three quotations containing the word humbug are presented here to illustrate the popular use of the word. Edmond de Goncourt — and Jules de Goncourt — were French siblings who coauthored their diaries and novels. The Goncourt journals, regarded as one of the masterpieces of 19th-century literature, provide a vivid chronicle of French literature, arts, and society.
There has never been an age so full of humbug. Humbug everywhere, even in science. A large painting of the scene by Warren and Lucia Prosperi hangs in the surgical amphitheater, whose most recent renovation has just been completed in time for the th anniversary of the historic medical event.
From its opening in until , more than 8, surgeries were performed under the glass dome, which has since been used as a storage area, a dormitory, a dining room for nurses, and most recently a teaching amphitheater. In , the room was designated a National Historic Site. Morton, another Yankee, born at Charlton, Massachusetts, in he was four years younger than Wells. Morton began his study of dentistry at the College of Dental Surgery in Baltimore in Two years later he began practicing in Farmington, Connecticut, near Hartford, and studied under Horace Wells for a time.
In the winter of he and Wells practiced as partners in Boston, but they later dissolved their partnership amicably, with Wells returning to Hartford. In March, , Morton matriculated at Harvard Medical School, but he had married that same year; there were financial difficulties; and he had to keep on with his dentistry. Charles T. Jackson, and told them about his discovery. Morton, later that year, visited him in Hartford and asked him for some of the gas.
In reply, Wells said, he advised Morton to get the nitrous oxide from Jackson, who was a chemist and ought to be able to provide it. The exact details of what happened during the ensuing year are clouded by controversy; but it is certain that Morton did consult Jackson, and Jackson gave him an idea for using ether instead of nitrous oxide.
The idea had grown out of something that happened to Dr. Jackson in the winter of — On that occasion he was preparing a lecture in which he planned to demonstrate a theory on volcanic eruptions with the use of pure chlorine gas.
During the preparation, a large jar of the gas overturned and broke. Jackson accidentally inhaled a large amount of the chlorine. His throat became severely inflamed, and in order to soothe the pain he alternately inhaled ammonia and ether, with great relief. Next day, his throat still painful, he made an extended trial of ether alone.
Having made this discovery, Jackson described it to a few people, including four dentists and a couple of doctors, but otherwise he did no more to acquaint the medical profession with its full significance than Dr. Crawford Long had done. This was unfortunate, for if ever there was an individual qualified by reputation to introduce such a discovery and have it quickly accepted, it was Dr. Charles Jackson. He not only was a respected physician, with a degree from Harvard Medical School, but he also had been recognized for work in a wide-ranging area of science: mineralogy, geology, chemistry, even electricity, and he was known to scientists both in America and in Europe, where he traveled widely.
Also, Jackson had already had a lesson in what may happen when one is slow in promoting good ideas. Returning on the Sully from Europe in with some electrical apparatus he had procured there, Jackson entertained his shipboard dinner companions one evening with an idea he had for sending signals over wires electromagnetically.
One of his hearers was Samuel F. With this event in his background, one might think that Jackson would have been leery at sharing his ideas. Yet when Morton came to him, that is precisely what Jackson did. He told the young dentist about ether. Morton used it to perform painless dental operations. A story about this appeared in a Boston newspaper and caused a good deal of discussion.
Early in October, , Morton called on the same Dr. Warren, with even more courage than he had shown in the case of Horace Wells, considering how that had turned out or did he strongly suspect that Wells, after all, had been right? In this instance, there is no question of locale. The demonstration, involving a young man who was to have a tumor removed from his neck, took place in the Massachusetts General amphitheater on October 16,, before an audience of doctors and medical students.
Morton has not come, perhaps he has another engagement. As Warren was about to begin the operation, Dr. Morton came in, out of breath, and red in the face from hurry. A way of accomplishing this had occurred to Morton at midnight. He immediately had gone to an instrument maker and got him out of bed to make the modification.
He had been up all night and had just rushed through the streets of Boston and up four flights of stairs to encounter a hostile audience and a patient whom he might just possibly kill, with a consequent indictment for manslaughter. As Warren was making an incision near the lower jaw, Morton very nearly suffered the same fate that had overtaken Horace Wells.
The patient muttered protestingly, as though he were still semiconscious. At the conclusion of the operation, Warren turned and stood facing the audience. He was a man whose normal demeanor was once compared with that of the Iron Duke, yet now there were tears in his eyes. A merciful hush had settled forever over the screaming that previously had been heard under what was now destined to be known as the Ether Dome.
The event made an enormous impression on the medical students who were present, the young men who would be the doctors and surgeons of later days. Within days the news had flashed all over the world; within weeks inhalation anesthesia had been accepted enthusiastically by leading members of the surgical and medical professions in the United States, England, and Europe.
Now everybody tried to get into the act, including Dr. Holmes that this process for producing insensibility was so new that there was no name for it. In a letter to Morton, Holmes said that everyone always wanted to have a hand in a great discovery, and he wished to propose a name for this one derived from the Greek. Morton, thinking of the discovery not in terms of a generic name but as a proprietary word, made a vain attempt to keep the nature of anesthesia a secret.
During the demonstrations of October 16 and 17 he referred to it only as a preparation or a compound. This approach did not work. The surgeons of the Massachusetts General Hospital quickly recognized the vapor as ether from its odor, and Morton was compelled to admit that his agent was ether before he administered it for the leg operation on November 7.
Morton next applied for a patent, and in doing so he ran into two problems. The first one was represented by Dr. Jackson, who in mid-October had informed Dr. Warren that he, not Morton, was the real discoverer of inhalation anesthesia. This Jackson did, but he assigned his rights to Morton and did not, at least openly, participate in the attempted commercialization. The second problem was that the patent law requires an application to include a clear and complete description of what the invention consists of.
The Morton-Jackson application therefore could not hold back any secrets. This is our discovery, and the combining it with or applying it to any operation of surgery … constitutes our invention. Whoever it was in the patent office who read and approved this application should have at once decided what a U.
Circuit Court declared seventeen years later: that this was a great and beneficial discovery of the utmost importance to mankind, but it legally was not entitled to patent protection. In an additional attempt to cast a proprietary veil over his invention, Morton added some aromatic oils to ether and called the mixture Letheon, an excellent name.
But when he offered Letheon to individuals and hospitals on a fee basis, the effort was not successful. The predominant view of the medical profession was that expressed by a Dr.
I doubt the validity of such letters patent. It would seem to me like patent sun-light or patent moon-shine. Horace Wells heard about this almost immediately, and Crawford Long, in Jefferson, Georgia, read about it in December, Long was interested but decided that before announcing his own prior discovery he would wait a few months to see if anyone else claimed a discovery still earlier than his. And while he was waiting, the matter somehow slipped his mind.
Wells and his physician friends in Hartford, on the other hand, at once began an attempt to set the record straight. Wells wrote to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal ; the Journal also received case reports from Hartford surgeons who had operated painlessly upon patients made insensible with nitrous oxide and who asserted the right of Horace Wells to be recognized for his discovery of inhalation anesthesia in Editor:—You are aware that there has been much said of late respecting a gas, which, when inhaled, so paralizes the system as to render it insensible to pain.
As Drs. Charles T. Jackson and W. Morton, of Boston, claim to be the originators of this invaluable discovery, I will give a short history of its first introduction, that the public may decide to whom belongs the honor.
Unfortunately for the experiment, the gas bag was by mistake withdrawn much too soon, and he was but partially under its influence when the tooth was extracted.
He testified that he experienced some pain. He had been unsuccessful in his public demonstration of inhalational anesthesia with nitrous oxide which took place on January 20, The demonstration had ended in failure when the patient cried out in pain in the middle of the operation, and Wells had been unmercifully jeered by the medical students in the audience.
Why would a false quote attributed to Warren first appear in Trials of a Public Benefactor in ? It was likely a deliberate attempt to distort history to persuade Congress to financially reward Morton financially.
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