On October 16, 1846, a dentist named William Morton put a patient under sulfuric ether so a Boston surgeon could cut into his neck without pain; the line that surgeon is famous for saying afterward may never have left his mouth.

Every surgeon in the room on the morning of October 16, 1846, knew roughly how an operation was supposed to go. Assistants would pin the patient to the table, and the surgeon would work as fast as his hands allowed while the man screamed underneath him. That is not what happened.

A dentist with a bad reputation to overcome

William Thomas Green Morton was 27, and the medical men of Boston did not think much of him. Dentists occupied a low rung in 1840s medicine, closer to tradesmen than physicians, and Morton had spent the previous two years chasing a specific problem: patients would not sit for tooth extractions if they could help it, and the ones who did often flinched hard enough to break instruments.

He had a source for his answer close at hand. Charles Thomas Jackson, a Boston chemist and geologist, had briefly been his landlord and sometime teacher, and in 1844 had shown Morton that inhaling sulfuric ether vapor could produce unconsciousness. Morton tried the gas on himself first, then on his dog, before he ever risked a patient. That September he pulled a sleeping man's tooth without a flinch out of him. Word reached John Collins Warren, the most senior surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, who agreed to let Morton try the gas on a real operation.

There was reason to be skeptical. A Hartford dentist named Horace Wells had tried almost the same thing in Boston not two years earlier, using nitrous oxide instead of ether (popularly remembered as happening in this same amphitheater, though a 2013 review of the primary sources found no solid evidence for that and traced the demonstration more likely to a public hall on Washington Street). His patient cried out during the tooth pulling, the crowd of physicians laughed, and Wells left Boston branded a fraud. Morton had once been Wells's business partner. Everyone in the amphitheater on the sixteenth had reason to expect a rerun.

What happened in the amphitheater

The patient was Edward Gilbert Abbott, a young Bostonian in his early twenties with a vascular tumor tangled under the left side of his jaw and tongue. He had been in the hospital's care since late September, and Warren planned to tie off the blood vessels feeding the growth.

Morton was late. When he finally arrived, he carried a glass globe fitted with a mouthpiece of his own design, and he administered the ether himself while a room of physicians and students watched. Within a few minutes Abbott was unresponsive. Warren made an incision more than two inches long beneath the jaw and worked a curved needle under the mass of vessels to tie it off. Abbott moved and made sounds partway through; afterward, fully awake, he said it had felt like nothing worse than a scrape. The whole operation ran under half an hour.

News of it moved through the medical world within weeks. Within two years, ether and its chemical cousin chloroform were standard in operating rooms on both sides of the Atlantic, and a specialty that did not yet have a name (anesthesiology) had its founding case.

Did Warren really call it "no humbug"?

The line most often attached to that morning is Warren turning to the assembled surgeons and announcing, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug," a jab, everyone assumes, at Wells's failed nitrous oxide trial the year before.

It is a good story, and it may not be true. No contemporary account of the operation mentions it. Warren's own diary entry that day is purely clinical: he records "an interesting operation at the Hospital" performed while the patient was "under the influence of Dr. Morton's preparation to prevent pain." The quote's earliest appearance in print is Nathan P. Rice's 1859 biography of Morton, thirteen years after the fact and three years after Warren had died and could no longer confirm or deny it. Physician Rajesh P. Haridas examined the sourcing in a 2016 paper in the journal Anesthesiology and concluded the phrase most likely entered the record as advocacy: Morton was petitioning Congress for a $100,000 reward at the time, and a memorable line from Boston's most respected surgeon did his case no harm.

None of that makes the underlying claim shaky. Multiple witnesses independently corroborated the operation itself, down to the type of tumor and the length of the incision, in ways a fabricated demonstration could not sustain. What is uncertain is a single quotable sentence, not the event it is attached to.

The discovery Morton spent his life fighting for

Morton tried to patent the gas, calling it "Letheon" and hiding that it was ordinary ether so he could license its use and collect royalties from every hospital in the country. Surgeons found this grasping and unprofessional, and hospitals mostly ignored the patent and used ether anyway.

Jackson, meanwhile, decided the whole discovery had been his. He wrote to the French Academy claiming priority dating back to 1842, years before he had ever mentioned ether to Morton, and spent the rest of his career insisting Morton had stolen his idea. The Academy eventually split a prize between the two men; Morton, insulted at having to share it, refused to accept his half. He petitioned Congress four times for compensation and got nothing every time, worn down by lobbying from Jackson's allies and by Wells's own belated claim to priority. Wells, addicted by then to the chloroform he had once demonstrated, died by suicide in a New York jail cell in 1848 after a public outburst; Jackson was committed to an asylum in 1873 and died there seven years later, still asserting he was the true discoverer of anesthesia. Morton himself died in 1868, at 48, after collapsing during a carriage ride through Central Park in the July heat, broke and embittered, over a discovery none of the three men would ever be allowed to call entirely his own.

What is left of that morning

The amphitheater where Abbott lay is still standing at Massachusetts General Hospital, its skylight and curved wooden benches largely unchanged since 1821. Surgeons operated there until 1867; afterward it became a lecture hall, and it still is one, now under a nickname built from the gas that made it famous. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1965.

Anesthesiologists around the world mark October 16 every year as the anniversary of that operation, and the observance has spread far past Boston: national anesthesia societies in more than a hundred countries hold their own ceremonies on or near the date. What began as one dentist's attempt to salvage his reputation after a colleague's public failure is now the reason nobody having surgery this week will remember a second of it.

Sources

• Massachusetts Historical Society, "Ether Day, 16 October 1846: the Conquest of Pain," Object of the Month, October 2016
• Paul G. Firth, "Ether Day Revisited: The Surgical Records of Edward Gilbert Abbott," Annals of Surgery Open, 2022
• Summer A. Niazi and Jack E. Riggs, "'Gentlemen! This is no humbug,'" Hektoen International, 2020 (discussing Rajesh P. Haridas's 2016 study in Anesthesiology)
• Wikipedia, "Ether Dome"
• Wikipedia, "Edward Gilbert Abbott"