Morton practiced a more aggressive form of dentistry, likely influenced
by his dental surgery professors in Baltimore. This resulted in him
struggling for patients, both in Hartford and later in Boston, when his
patients suffered more pain from his more invasive techniques. Ambitious,
industrious, and battling for recognition, Morton entered Harvard’s
medical school in 1844, enrolling in the chemistry classes of Charles
Jackson.
Charles Jackson (1805–1880) was another Massachusetts native,
coming of age in a combustible era of intellectual breakthroughs in
geology, chemistry, medicine, and mineralogy. Jackson graduated from
both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, and while he initially
stayed in Boston to teach and research the exciting new field of chemistry,
his career and varied interests led him across Europe and America. His life
would be characterized by clever insights and vast curiosities, but also
with a bizarre tendency to claim priority in invention, asserting his
primacy in the development of the telegraph, guncotton, and most
important, ether anesthesia. Like his eventual rivals Wells and Morton, his
death was ignominious, but there is no doubt that he played a pivotal role
in educating Morton about the properties of ether and its possible use as an
anesthetic.
In the months following Horace Wells’s failed laughing gas
demonstration before the Harvard medical students and faculty, Morton
began a clandestine investigation into ether. Initially, it was for his own
practice, having a “direct pecuniary motive, bearing almost daily upon
him, to alleviate or annihilate pain under his operations.”^18 Animal
experimentation gave way to testing ether vapors on two young dental
assistants, and by the summer of 1846, Morton was becoming convinced
of the utility of using ether for dental surgery and general surgery as well.
William Morton choreographed his scientific moves with careful
business acumen, consulting again with Jackson about the ether
preparation and conferring with a patent commissioner about the
potentialities of his claiming primacy in the use of ether. Coinciding with
his commercial exchanges, Morton finally attempted a tooth extraction
using inhaled gas from an ether-soaked handkerchief on September 30,
- The procedure was accomplished on a somnolent, pain-free male;
instead of the usual tortuous affair, Dr. Morton was able to extract the