Molly McDonough at Harvard Magazine:
On October 16, 1846, physicians filled the surgical amphitheater at Massachusetts General Hospital to watch dentist William Morton test a bold new idea.
Morton held a glass inhaler filled with an ether-soaked sponge and asked a patient, Gilbert Abbott, to breathe in. Within minutes, Abbott lay motionless. Surgeon John Collins Warren then made an incision in Abbott’s neck and removed a tumor. When Abbott awoke, he reported having felt no pain. It was the first public demonstration of the use of ether for surgical anesthesia, and a moment that changed medical history.
About 140 years later, in the same hospital, medical student Emery Brown, MD ’87, started his rotation in anesthesiology. He was quickly hooked. He loved channeling his knowledge of physiology and pharmacology to manage a patient moment-by-moment in the operating room. But there was one problem that began to bug him: Although general anesthesia had been used millions of times since 1846, nobody in the field seemed to really know — or even care — how the practice actually worked.
More here.
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