The first public operation under ether anesthesia was performed in Boston on October 16, 1846, in the surgical amphitheatre of Massachusetts General Hospital, a room that still stands and is still called the Ether Dome. A dentist, William T. G. Morton, gave the vapour, and the surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumour from a man's neck while the patient felt nothing. When it was over, the patient said he had known nothing of the pain. Warren turned to the audience and said, gentlemen, this is no humbug.
Before it, surgery was a horror. A patient was held down by assistants and operated on as fast as the surgeon could cut, because the pain was so great that speed was the only mercy, and operations were measured in minutes and counted in screams. The idea of putting a patient to sleep had been tried in scattered ways, with the gases and the herbs, but nothing had been shown to a room of sceptical doctors and accepted. October 16 was the day the demonstration worked.
The credit was fought over at once, and the fight is still part of the story. Morton wanted the patent and the fortune, and he called the vapour Letheon to hide what it was, and it was plainly ether. Another Boston dentist, Horace Wells, had tried nitrous oxide two years before and been laughed out of a demonstration, and Charles Jackson, a chemist, claimed he had given Morton the idea, and the three men spent the rest of their lives disputing it, and all three came to bad ends.
The practice spread within weeks. By the end of the year the operation had been repeated in London and Paris, and within months anaesthesia was being used in field hospitals and in the first operations that could afford to be slow. The date is now marked as Ether Day, and the amphitheatre where it happened is kept as the place surgery stopped being a race against pain.