William T. G. Morton
William Morton gave the first successful public demonstration of surgical anaesthesia and spent the rest of his life fighting over the credit. Born in Massachusetts in 1819 to a farming family, he trained as a dentist, practised in Connecticut and Boston, and briefly attended Harvard Medical School without qualifying. Dentistry was the spur. Extraction was agonising, and patients avoided it; Morton had a commercial interest in a set of false teeth that required the removal of existing roots. He learned about ether from Charles Jackson, a chemist and physician with whom he lodged, and experimented on animals and on himself. On 16 October 1846, at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumour from the neck of a printer named Gilbert Abbott while Morton administered ether from a glass inhaler. The patient did not cry out. Warren turned to the observers and said that this was no humbug. The operating theatre is still called the Ether Dome. News reached Europe within weeks and the practice spread almost immediately, ending the condition under which all surgery had been conducted for the whole of human history. Morton attempted to patent it, disguising the ether with dye and perfume and calling it Letheon, which the profession regarded as unethical for something that relieved suffering. The secret was obvious to any chemist. He then spent two decades in litigation with Jackson, who claimed the idea, and Crawford Long, who had used ether privately from 1842, and Horace Wells, who had used nitrous oxide. He was never paid, and died in poverty in 1868.
- Lived: 1819 CE – 1868 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: dentist, physician, inventor
