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• Crawford Williamson Long’s use of ether in Georgia in March 1842, unpublished until 1849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