Bronze plaque, 36" x 23".
Dr. William Morton (1819-1868) was a dentist and the introducer of ether anesthesia in 1846 when he was looking for a way to reduce the pain of his patients. Despite being commonly thought of as the “inventor and revealer” of anesthesia, he was not the first person to use ether for surgical anesthesia; that would be Dr. Crawford Williamson Long. On October 16, 1846, he persuaded surgeon Dr. John Collins Warren to, using ether, allow the anesthetization of a patient, Gilbert Abbott, undergoing the removal of a neck tumor at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Ether Dome. For the first time, surgical anesthesia had been publicly demonstrated. Within eight months, operations under ether anesthesia were being performed in Australia, literally half the world away from Boston.

Dr. Morton was born in Charlton, Massachusetts. He claimed to have graduated from Baltimore Dental College in 1842, although in reality he had never attended dental nor medical school. In 1943 he married Elizabeth Whitman, only her parents objected to his profession and only agreed to support the marriage after Dr. Warren promised to study medicine. So, after receiving tutoring from Dr. Charles T. Jackson at Harvard Medical School, he was eventually awarded an honorary medical degree by Washington University in Baltimore in 1852.

Following the demonstration, Dr. Morton tried to lie about what substance had been used, attempting to pass it off as “letheon”. Though, the truth was quickly found out and ether’s use rapidly spread across the globe. Dr. Morton did receive a patent for ether in the United States but it was later revoked, and he never received any royalties.

In the autumn of 1862 he joined the Army of the Potomac as a volunteer surgeon, and applied ether to more than two thousand wounded soldiers during the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness.

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