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The Operating Room Where Anesthesia Was First Demonstrated Is Now a Landmark. But for the Men Who Claimed Credit, There Was Much Misery

Medical procedures used to be a scream-filled endurance test until doctors at this Boston institution learned to tame the pain of patients

The “Ether Dome” at Massachusetts General Hospital is now a National Historic Landmark.
The “Ether Dome” at Massachusetts General Hospital is now a National Historic Landmark.
The “Ether Dome” at Massachusetts General Hospital is now a National Historic Landmark. Ty Cole

The Operating Room Where Anesthesia Was First Demonstrated Is Now a Landmark. But for the Men Who Claimed Credit, There Was Much Misery

Medical procedures used to be a scream-filled endurance test until doctors at this Boston institution learned to tame the pain of patients

Photographs by Ty Cole

The “Ether Dome” at Massachusetts General Hospital is now a National Historic Landmark.
The “Ether Dome” at Massachusetts General Hospital is now a National Historic Landmark. Ty Cole

The most important demonstration in medical history was about to begin. The date: October 16, 1846. The setting: the operating room at the top of Massachusetts General Hospital, a dome-topped amphitheater built to both capture the sunlight and isolate the screams of surgical patients. 

Surrounding the table stood a gaggle of Boston’s most reputable surgeons, including John Collins Warren, one of the hospital’s co-founders. A driven, puritanical man, Warren had studied in the medical capitals of London, Paris and Edinburgh. Bare-knuckled in black coats, he and his colleagues had gathered at Mass General in front of a steeply banked gallery of medical students. They were about to perform what they hoped would be the first  surgery on a successfully anesthetized patient. 

About two years earlier, in another one of Warren’s classes, a Connecticut dentist named Horace Wells had tried to anesthetize a patient with nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas. Wells had come upon the substance while attending an event in which a showman dosed volunteers with the gas. The audience watched with delight as the volunteers lost all inhibition, laughing and prancing. Wells had seen one volunteer injure his knee but experience no pain. That had inspired him to give the gas to his patients before tooth extractions. 

After several successful trials in his office, Wells brought the formula to Boston. The procedure at Mass General, a tooth extraction, started out well, but after a few moments the patient moaned. It seemed that Wells had withdrawn the gas bag too soon. The audience erupted into hisses, boos and cries of “Humbug!” Wells was humiliated. 

This time, a dentist named William T.G. Morton would use another inhaled substance as an anesthetic: ether. As the doctors and students looked on, Morton readied his equipment, a glass sphere with a small sponge in the bottom, a valve on one side and a tube projecting from the other. He poured ether onto the sponge, held the tube to the patient’s lips and told him to inhale. The man’s body twitched for a few minutes and then lay still. Morton stood back as Warren began the operation, a brief procedure to remove a tumor from the patient’s neck. The patient did not struggle or scream. Unlike in every surgery demonstration that came before it, the patient remained sedated through the entire operation.

Warren turned to the audience and uttered what would become one of the most famous sentences in the history of medicine. “Gentlemen,” he said, “this is no humbug.” 

An 1847 photo op at the Ether Dome. Surgeon John Collins Warren holds the patient’s legs. William T.G. Morton is at the patient’s head, administering ether.
An 1847 photo op at the Ether Dome. Surgeon John Collins Warren holds the patient’s legs. William T.G. Morton is at the patient’s head, administering ether. Southworth and Hawes / Massachusetts General Hospital Archives & Special Collections
Items from Mass General’s collections include a 19th-century syringe and needles.
Items from Mass General’s collections include a 19th-century syringe and needles.  Ty Cole

That day, something entirely new was ushered into the world—surgery as we know it. Anesthesia would help place America, long considered a medical backwater, on the world’s medical map. Ether was to medicine what longitude was to navigation and the airplane wing was to flight. Throughout history, nothing but death had been considered as unavoidable as pain. 

Today, anesthesia during surgery is routine, with options ranging from local injections to intravenous or spinal delivery. Breathing tubes and continuous monitoring, introduced in the 20th century, help ensure that patients’ airways stay open while they’re under. But although that first successful demonstration in 1846 benefited untold millions of people, it brought only misery and pain to ether’s discoverers.

Morton had a secret past. He’d been a con man, drifting from one city to another, embezzling funds, defrauding his partners and in one case creating counterfeit postal seals. Fleeing a step ahead of the police, he’d returned to his native New England, decided to reform and married the daughter of a prominent family. He’d met Wells, who instructed him in dentistry (a crude practice at the time, easily taught to an apprentice), and the partners opened a branch office in Boston. 

In 1843, Morton and Wells came up with an idea for a new kind of denture and hired Charles Jackson, an eminent Boston chemist and geologist, to analyze the metal in the denture and endorse it. After Wells’ humiliation, Morton consulted with Jackson about which gas might be more effective. Jackson suggested a gaseous form of sulfuric ether, a liquid long used to alleviate stomach cramps and topical pain, and sometimes enjoyed in recreational “frolics.” Morton had a local craftsman fashion an inhaler so a patient could breathe in the gas as it evaporated from a liquid-soaked sponge. He experimented on his dog and himself before playing his part in the miracle at Mass General.

Did you know? Speed was of the essence

  • Before anesthesia, surgeons strove to finish painful surgeries as quickly as possible. A skilled surgeon could amputate a leg in under 30 seconds.
  • According to History.com, "The longer a patient was on the table, the greater their suffering and the greater the chance that they would die from blood loss or shock."
Warren was the surgeon who declared Morton’s demonstration a success.
Warren was the surgeon who declared Morton’s demonstration a success. Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library, Harvard University
Chemist Charles Jackson, top, was one of several men who claimed to be the father of anesthesia.
Chemist Charles Jackson was one of several men who claimed to be the father of anesthesia. Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library, Harvard University
The theater-style seating in the Ether Dome gave students a chance to watch surgeries up close. No one in the room wore scrubs; the hospital didn’t have sterile conditions until 1880.
The theater-style seating in the Ether Dome gave students a chance to watch surgeries up close. No one in the room wore scrubs; the hospital didn’t have sterile conditions until 1880. Ty Cole

After the surgery, Morton took out a patent on the substance, calling it “letheon.” When the military used ether while treating soldiers during the Civil War, Morton unsuccessfully petitioned Congress for a reward. From then on, he spent part of each year living in Washington, D.C., lavishly entertaining politicians to enlist them to his cause. Jackson, the chemist, claimed that ether had been his idea, and that Morton had simply demonstrated it in public. Meanwhile, Wells claimed credit for discovering inhaled anesthesia, even though his demonstration had appeared to fail. A decades-long battle ensued. Wells gathered affidavits and testimonials from his peers in Connecticut, while Morton and Jackson fought each other for congressional recognition, financial reward and international acclaim. The fight took its toll. Wells, who never recovered from his humiliation, became addicted to chloroform and died by suicide at 33, just 15 months after the demonstration at Mass General. 

Morton exhausted himself with his frenetic lobby-ing and spending, letting his dental practice and farm fall into ruin. In 1860, he died bankrupt and broken at 48. Jackson invested his energy in an attempt to sully Morton’s reputation and burnish his own. In June of 1873, he suffered what doctors called a “paralytic shock” (possibly a stroke). He spent the next seven years at the McLean Asylum for the Insane, where he died at 75.

Some 20 people associated with the hospital dressed in period costumes to pose for the 2001 oil painting Ether Day, 1846, by Warren and Lucia Prosperi. The painting now hangs on a wall inside the Ether Dome.
Some 20 people associated with the hospital dressed in period costumes to pose for the 2001 oil painting Ether Day, 1846, by Warren and Lucia Prosperi. The painting now hangs on a wall inside the Ether Dome. Ty Cole

No one can deny the impact of their contributions. In the year after Morton’s demonstration, surgeons at Mass General performed 17 operations with anesthesia; today they perform more than 50,000 such operations annually. Globally, surgeons perform more than 200 million operations under anesthetics each year. They rarely use ether anymore: It was phased out in the 1960s and ’70s, with the discovery of less flammable anesthetics with fewer side effects. 

Who should get credit for the discovery? Historians give partial recognition to all three men, and to a fourth, Crawford Long of Athens, Georgia, who experimented with ether in 1842 but did not publish his findings until 1849, three years after the demonstration at Mass General. All four men have been memorialized in stone. There are statues of Long in Georgia and Washington, D.C. and of Wells in Connecticut, and tombstones at the gravesites of Morton and Jackson. Inscriptions on each claim sole credit.

A 19th-century anesthesia device, made by Boston-area manufacturers Codman and Shurtleff. The device’s opening contains a small sea sponge, which was soaked with ether.
A 19th-century anesthesia device, made by Boston-area manufacturers Codman and Shurtleff. The device’s opening contains a small sea sponge, which was soaked with ether.  Ty Cole
The theater that would become the Ether Dome opened in 1821, before electric lighting. Surgeons relied on natural light, aided by candles and oil lamps in the winter.
The theater that would become the Ether Dome opened in 1821, before electric lighting. Surgeons relied on natural light, aided by candles and oil lamps in the winter. Ty Cole
The room at Mass General where the experiment took place, now called the Ether Dome, is a designated National Historic Site and open to the public. But the grandest monument stands in the Boston Public Garden. Forty feet tall, with Gothic-style arches and columns, it’s topped with a sculpture of a doctor cradling a supine patient on his knee, preparing to give him a dose of anesthetic. The sculptor inscribed no names on the structure, only biblical quotations about the blessed work of alleviating pain. It’s the nation’s only monument to a drug. 
Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine Summer 2026 issue

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This article is a selection from the Summer 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Ty Cole is an architecture and design photographer. He has previously created images of the Library of Congress for Smithsonian.

Douglas Starr, emeritus professor of science journalism at Boston University, is author of The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science.

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