Ether frolics

As with buses, you wait several millenniums for a painless approach to surgery and then four would-be pioneers come along at once. Yet medical immortality is invariably conferred on he—and it’s usually he—who shouts first and most loudly.⇑

The US dentist William Morton is widely hailed as the inventor of pain free surgery after he used ether to extract a patient’s tooth on 30 September 1846. A few weeks later, on 16 October, Morton administered ether during an operation to remove a neck tumour from a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. News travelled quickly. In England, Robert Liston lost no time in claiming the laurels for …