sidewalk, you strain your eyes to see the structure that is ensconced behind
the trees, up a slight slope. After trekking about four hundred feet, winding
along the sidewalk, the structure comes into view. This is the original
Massachusetts General Hospital, now two hundred years old. It is now
referred to as the Bulfinch Building (after the architect, Charles Bulfinch)
and largely provides administrative offices for the campus.
Gazing at the white granite Bulfinch Building and letting your eyes
track upward, higher than the three levels of windows and above the
triangular pediment, is a square-shaped central tower which supports a
large dome, capped with a small cupola, both clothed with copper, now
with a verdigris patina. This regal, classical revival-style hospital seems
out of place; the surrounding clinical edifices are swarming with patients,
residents, nurses, and attending doctors, but the Bulfinch Building stands
in somber silence. Thankfully, as the campus expanded, the grand old lady
has remained untouched, and standing in front of the building, no time has
passed since 1846, when history was made up in the dome.
The first surgical amphitheater in the Western Hemisphere was at the
University of Pennsylvania, opening in 1804. Like all European and
American surgical amphitheaters built in the 19th century, the theaters in
Philadelphia and Boston were on the top floor, with large windows and
skylights. Candles provided some light, but in the era before electricity,
sunlight was the greatest illumination surgeons could hope for. The
Massachusetts General Hospital was completed in 1823, and while an
architect could never be faulted for placing a surgical amphitheater nearest
to the sun, only a quarter century would pass until the practical positioning
of a theater atop a hospital also became a symbolic representation of the
revolutionary change in surgery.
A “grand exhibition of the effects produced by inhaling nitrous oxide”
was advertised in the Connecticut’s Hartford Courant on December 10,
1844, attracting the lay public and professionals alike. Specifically, a
dentist in Hartford named Horace Wells attended the demonstration with
his wife, and was astonished at laughing gas’s ability to mask pain among
the volunteers, including a young man who suffered a bloody injury to his
leg. In a matter of weeks, Dr. Wells was extracting teeth with patients
under the influence of laughing gas, later writing, “I was so much elated
with this discovery, that I started immediately for Boston, resolving to
give it into the hands of proper persons ...”^14