Who Discovered Anesthesia?

One day last week 10,000 Southerners poured into the little town of Jefferson in northern Georgia. Most of them went to see Postmaster General Jim Farley, posting through the South on one of his periodic junkets (see p. 15). Officially, they went to honor Jefferson's Crawford Williamson Long, first doctor to operate under ether, 98 years ago. At noon, on the village square, the Postmaster General sold a sheaf of new two-cent stamps, bearing the bearded countenance of Dr. Long, to the only survivor of his twelve children--his aged daughter, Mrs. Eugenia Long Harper.

The high-school band blared, and Postmaster Farley added his two cents' worth about "the red hills of Georgia and her noble sons."

In medical circles up North, there was much grumbling about the Long stamp.

Most doctors believe, with their sainted masters, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,* Sir William Osier and Dr. William H. Welch, that the real originator of anesthesia was Dentist William Thomas Green Morton, a Boston contemporary of Dr. Long. From San Francisco last week Dr. Morton's daughter-in-law, Mrs. Bowditch Morton, filed her filial protest. "It's a strange thing," said she, "that Farley didn't consult with the U. S. Public Health Service.[He wants] to curry favor with the South during an election year."

Thus aired again was an ancient medical controversy which had resulted in starvation for one scientist, insanity for a second, suicide for a third.

In the early 19th Century, shortly after chemists discovered ether and nitrous oxide (laughing gas), some medical students went on jags, taking a few whiffs of one drug or the other until half-conscious and happily drunk. In the early 1840s,'dashing young Dr. Long sniffed ether at parties, but was clear-headed enough to notice that his drunken friends, if they came to blows, felt no pain. So one day in 1842, he fearfully soaked a towel in ether, anesthetized a friend before removing a tumor.

Delighted with his success, Dr. Long tried ether on eight other patients. But gradually the word spread around that he was a sorcerer, and he was forced to give up anesthesia. Too modest to publish his early experiments until many years later, he laid his ether bottles aside.

Meantime, moon-faced Horace Wells, a dentist of Hartford, Conn., successfully tried laughing gas on himself before a colleague pulled his tooth. Dazzled with hopes of a fortune, he tried the wonder gas on half-a-dozen patients, then dashed off to Massachusetts General Hospital to demonstrate it. But at the hospital the gas didn't work, and he was hooted out.

Then a patient died under anesthesia, and Wells turned to selling art reproductions and portable showerbaths. After brooding over his failure for five years, he finally went crazy, was arrested for dashing acid into the face of a streetwalker. In jail he slashed the femoral artery of his leg. After Wells died, nitrous oxide anesthesia was forgotten until 1900.

But Wells had a partner, a cautious, experimental man, William Morton. He had no trust in laughing gas, but tried ether for years, independently of Long, on countless bugs, goldfish, rats, worms and dogs. Finally he successfully anesthetized himself and several patients. In 1846, he gave an ether demonstration before the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Said famed Surgeon John C. Warren to his amazed colleagues: "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." Doctors soon took up anesthesia with enthusiasm, but forgot Morton. For a while, he went into partnership with Charles Jackson, a noted chemist and physicist, but finally, homeless and starving, he petitioned Congress for a grant.

In 1849 Congress was ready to award him $100,000, but Chemist Jackson stormed Washington, violently denounced Morton as a fraud, claimed that he had given Morton the tip on the powers of ether. Up popped Dr. Long with a sheaf of documents to prove that he was first. Confronted by conflicting claims, Congress did nothing. Morton died a pauper in 1868. Jackson went mad, died in an asylum several years later. During the Civil War, Long buried his documents in the woods. Later he dug them up and stored them in the garret. He died an embittered old man in 1878. And nobody has the clear credit.

-- Who coined the word "anesthesia" in 1846, sired the late great Supreme Court Justice in 1841.

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