Our Surgical Heritage: The Genesis of Painless Surgery

John Warren of Massachusetts General Hospital invited Morton to exhibit the substance.Morton had already modified his ether machine into a two-necked glass globe.One allowed the inflow of air.The other neck had a mouthpiece through which the patient inhaled air from the surface of an ether-soaked sponge in the globe.On the morning of 16th October, the operation theater was crowded with surgeons and medical students.The patient was Gilbert Abbott, 20 years of age, who had a benign vascular tumor of the neck. 7 Dr Warren prepared to operate.The patient lay silent, making no screams of pain, and had eyes closed as if in sleep while the surgeon was doing his work.The operation took 30 minutes, and at the end, Abbott agreed that the whole affair had been painless." 7 The next patient was a 21-year-old servant girl, Alice Mohan, with tuberculosis of the knee joint.Drs George Hayward and Warren and Bigelow were the surgeons.Morton administered the ether, and after some coughing, the patient fell into a deep sleep.She woke up to find her leg amputated painlessly. 7 The next test was for the great Robert Liston to amputate a limb with chronic osteomyelitis of the tibia.The theater at the UCH was packed to capacity.The ether apparatus is held at the patient's WIllIam thomas Green mortonMorton deserves the title of father of modern anesthetics. 7He noted that his patients had no pain when they breathed ether vapor to deaden tooth sockets.