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(More customer reviews)Who invented anesthesia? If you learned a name for this invention, it was probably William Thomas Green Morton. He turns out to be the most colorful and rascally character in the wonderful _Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It_ (HarperCollins) by Julie M. Fenster, but he isn't the only one. The invention of anesthesia was one of the most divisive issues in medicine in the nineteenth century. Fenster has dug up an amazing story of the origin of the first great advance in modern medicine, and told it in a lively and dramatic fashion. Opium, alcohol, ice, Mesmerism, and even bleeding into a faint had been used to avoid the horrors of surgery on a conscious patient, with little success. Reliable anesthesia was the first great advance in modern medicine.
Nitrous oxide, laughing gas, used to be a party and theatrical intoxicant. After an exhibition of its use, Horace Wells, a dentist, realized it cut pain. He began to use it in dental extractions. Morton met Wells in 1842, after a youthful career of spectacularly defrauding creditors in various big cities, and decided to take up dentistry under Wells's tutelage. Morton later met Charles T. Jackson, a chemist, who maintained that he had suggested to Morton the use of ether for dental extractions. Morton was eventually invited to administer ether before a rapt audience at the Massachusetts General Hospital on 16 October 1846, which is known by historians of anesthesia as Ether Day. It went perfectly. Morton tried the shocking precedent of patenting ether, and when that didn't work, he spent his life petitioning Congress for a reward for his invention, an award opposed by Jackson and Wells.
Indeed, Morton got medals and fame for what he had done, but it never made him rich, and rich was what he wanted to be. Wells experimented with chloroform, which was an effective anesthetic but more dangerous than ether, and became addicted to it. He was arrested for throwing acid onto prostitutes while he was chloroformed, and killed himself in jail. Jackson never got the recognition he was sure he deserved for the invention of ether, which only compounded the bitterness he felt that he had also given Morse the idea for the telegraph. He spent the last seven years of his life in an asylum. None of the inventors got what he wanted. This is a complicated tale, wittily told. We have no one hero on which we can bestow the title "The Inventor of Anesthesia" (and Fenster reports a competing and prior claim by Dr. Crawford Long in Georgia, who used ether to removing a swelling on a patient's neck in 1842). It is a messy history, entertainingly told.
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Ether Day is the unpredictable story of America's first major scientific discovery -- the use of anesthesia -- told in an absorbing narrative that traces the dawn of modern surgery through the lives of three extraordinary men. Ironically, the "discovery" was really no discovery at all: Ether and nitrous oxide had been known for more than forty years to cause insensitivity to pain, yet, with names like "laughing gas," they were used almost solely for entertainment. Meanwhile, patients still underwent operations during which they saw, heard, and felt every cut the surgeon made. The image of a grim and grisly operating room, like the one in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, was in fact starkly accurate in portraying the conditions of surgery before anesthesia.With hope for relief seemingly long gone, the breakthrough finally came about by means of a combination of coincidence and character, as a cunning Boston dentist crossed paths with an inventive colleague from Hartford and a brilliant Harvard-trained physician. William Morton, Horace Wells, and Charles Jackson: a con man, a dreamer, and an intellectual. Though Wells was crushed by derision when he tried to introduce anesthetics, Morton prevailed, with help from Jackson. The result was Ether Day, October 16, 1846, celebrated around the world. By that point, though, no honor was enough. Ether Day was not only the dawn of modern surgery, but the beginning of commercialized medicine as well, as Morton patented the discovery.What followed was a battle so bitter that it sent all three men spiraling wildly out of control, at the same time that anesthetics began saving countless lives. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Ether Day is a riveting look at one of history's most remarkable untold stories.
