Thread: History of Anaesthesia and Painful Memories.

On October 16, 1846, Boston dentist William T.G. Morton at Massachusetts General Hospital, used sulfuric ether to anaesthetise a man who needed surgery to remove a vascular tumor from his neck, according to

“The Painful Story Behind Modern Anesthesia” by Dr. Howard Markel. William T.G. Morton called his creation Letheon, named after the Lethe River of Greek mythology, noted for its waters that helped erase “painful memories.”

Morton started buying ether from a local chemist and began exposing himself and a menagerie of pets to ether fumes. Satisfied with its safety and reliability, he began using ether on his dental patients.

Soon, mobs of tooth-aching, dollar-waving Bostonians made their way to his office. Morton relished his financial success but quickly perceived that Letheon was good for far more than pulling teeth.

Historical accounts say Morton hoped to make a fortune off his “discovery,” but he ran into many snags before and afterward. Morton worked with another dentist, Horace Wells. In 1845, just one year before the first successful surgery with anesthesia, Morton and Wells had been

experimenting with nitrous oxide (“laughing gas”). During one infamous demonstration at Harvard Medical School in 1845, the two dentists failed at deadening the pain of a subject having a tooth pulled, causing major humiliation for both men.

News of ether’s remarkable properties spread rapidly across the Atlantic to Britain, ultimately stimulating the discovery of chloroform, a volatile general anaesthetic.

Chloroform subsequently became the most commonly used general anaesthetic in British surgical and dental anaesthetic practice, mainly due to the founding father of scientific anaesthesia John Snow, but remained non-essential to the practice of most doctors.

This changed after Snow gave Queen Victoria chloroform during the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold in 1857. The publicity that followed made anaesthesia more acceptable and demand increased with subsequent developments whether during childbirth or for other reasons.