administered ether gas to young James Venable. Like all operations before
the advent of antibiotics, the tumor resection procedure was one of
extraction, not implantation. It goes without saying that it was performed
near a window, illuminated with sunlight, the incandescent lightbulb still
decades away.
Initially, Crawford Long did not think of reporting his revolutionary
technique. Dozens of the most important moments in science and
medicine were achieved in obscurity in small hamlets by lone geniuses;
oddly, the urge to proclaim the discovery to contemporaries oftentimes is
nonexistent. Several years would pass until Long saw a report in the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (forerunner to the New England
Journal of Medicine) on December 9, 1846, by John Collins Warren,
reporting on the fantastical achievement on the use of ether in the
prevention of pain during surgery. One can only imagine Long’s horror,
being scooped by a group of Boston physicians and surgeons. He
simultaneously felt shock at someone else solving the pain conundrum
with the selfsame ether and not a little bit of dismay for not capitalizing
on his priority. These dismal feelings would germinate and mature,
particularly as the triumvirate of pioneers in Boston battled with each
other, clamoring for prestige and financial windfall.
When you disembark from Boston’s Red Line train at the “T stop” at
the Charles/MGH station, you are confronted with the stark contrast of the
gleaming metal and glass of the above-ground station and the intimidating
stone edifice of the Liberty Hotel, formerly the Suffolk County Jail. As
you walk east along Cambridge Street, you encounter the Museum of
Medical History and Innovation (obviously, one of my favorite places in
Boston). Turning left, and heading north up Grove Street, you are flanked
by huge, urban parking structures. An angled cul-de-sac of medical
buildings awaits you, one block in the distance, and at the end of the
canyon of a mishmash of redbrick rectangular structures and silver metal
and glass clinic medical buildings, lies a rounded white brick tower, The
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Actually, all these buildings are
part of the MGH campus, including many more that you cannot see.
Instead of walking toward the MGH tower, if you wander east along
Parkman Street, past the Wang Ambulatory Care Center, you will
encounter a tree-lined lane to your left. It’s another gorge of medical
buildings, but in an unexpected parklike setting, and as you walk along the
marcin
(Marcin)
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