William T.G. Morton: Ether Dome Triumph, the Letheon Patent and Ruin

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Before October 16, 1846, surgery meant being strapped to a table fully awake. This episode follows William T.G. Morton, born in Charlton, Massachusetts in 1819, a former clerk and salesman who left the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery without a degree and built a business soldering false teeth to gold plates. To win over the prominent Whitman family of Farmington, Connecticut, he promised to become a physician and enrolled at Harvard, where chemist Charles T. Jackson introduced him to sulfuric ether. In September 1846 he pulled a tooth from Ebenezer Frost without pain, and surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow arranged a demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital, where John Collins Warren removed a neck tumor from a silent patient.

Then Morton disguised the ether with aromatic oils, called it Letheon, and patented it, enraging the medical profession. A bitter fight for credit followed with Jackson and his former partner of three weeks, Horace Wells, while Congress stalled on his request for a $100,000 reward. Morton testified erratically in the Webster and Parkman murder trial, then gave ether to more than 2,000 wounded soldiers as a Civil War volunteer. In July 1868 he suffered a stroke in a New York carriage and ran into a Central Park lake before dying at St. Luke's Hospital.

How ether depresses the cerebral cortex while leaving the brainstem running
Morton's failed lawsuit against the United States, argued by Richard Henry Dana Jr.
His widow's three medals, the only rewards she said he ever received
Crawford Williamson Long's use of ether in Georgia in March 1842, unpublished until 1849
Boston's ether monument, which shows an anonymous doctor in Moorish robes to avoid choosing sides

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