On Friday, Oct. 16, 1846, William Thomas Green Morton changed the world of medicine with his demonstration of vaporized ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston.

The discovery and public demonstration of ether anesthesia was not a sudden achievement, though. In fact, it was the results of incremental scientific gains by dozens of scientists from Raymond Lully, the Spanish alchemist who first distilled sulfuric ether in 1275, to Joseph Priestly, the English researcher who developed nitrous oxide in 1774, and finally to Morton.

But there is more to the story than those early pioneers could have known. This season we will be retelling and reimagining the story about the dawn of anesthesia use with a slight twist. We will also dive into the latest research into the mechanisms of anesthesia’s effects on the brain—knowledge the early innovators in anesthesia could not have realized in their time.

This is episode 1 of season 3 of “Anesthesiology News presents The Etherist.” Episode 2 will be available on Oct. 26, 2021.

Sponsored by Masimo and Medtronic.

Suggested Reading

• Fenster JM. Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It. Perennial; 2002.
• Mets B. Leadership in Anaesthesia: Five Pioneers of the Deadly Quest for Surgical Insensibility. Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2021.
• Mets B. Waking Up Safer?: An Anesthesiologist’s Record. SilverWood Books; 2018.
• Snow SJ. Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaethetics Changed the World. Oxford University Press; 2008.
• Sykes K, Bunker J. Anaesthesia and the Practice of Medicine: Historical Perspectives. 1st ed. CRC Press; 2007.

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