tooth without fanfare, emboldening him to approach the most respected
surgeon in America.
Given Morton’s experience of a single patient, his boldness in
approaching John Collins Warren, the professor of surgery at Harvard, is
curious. Morton was well aware of the previous nitrous oxide
misadventure just twenty months earlier, and one must wonder about his
“considerable self-confidence or considerable foolhardiness, or perhaps a
good measure of each. It certainly flew in the face of scientific restraint, in
view of the fact the twenty-seven-year-old dentist’s experience with ether
was minimal, his knowledge of its hazards was nil, and he had not yet even
bothered to do anything about perfecting an apparatus by which the gas
could be administered to a human subject.”^19
Morton, however, charged ahead.
John Collins Warren (1778–1856) was the second professor of surgery
at Harvard (his father, John Warren, was the first). Although his father had
founded the Harvard Medical School, John Collins Warren received his
medical education in Europe, training under Sir Astley Cooper in London
and Baron Guillaume Dupuytren in Paris, eventually obtaining his medical
degree from Edinburgh University.
When Warren returned to Boston, he became one of the “fathers of
American medicine,” establishing the journal that would become the New
England Journal of Medicine, cofounding the Massachusetts General
Hospital and the American Medical Association, becoming the first dean
of the Harvard Medical School, and ascending to the title of professor of
surgery for over thirty years. Revered, Dr. Warren was austere and highly
skilled—his “flint-faced, grizzled appearance belied the fact that in a
lifetime of surgery he had never been able to inure himself to the horrors
of the operating theater.”^20
Despite Morton’s optimism, he must have been surprised with Warren’s
willingness to experiment upon one of his surgical patients. William
Morton feverishly collaborated with an instrument maker, fashioning a
glass apparatus with two openings and a central vessel that contained an
ether-soaked sea sponge. With only a few days’ notice, Warren invited
Morton to come to MGH with his device for a procedure on a young man
with a vascular tumor below his jaw.
On Friday, October 16, 1846, Gilbert Abbot, a young TB patient, was
readied for surgery in the amphitheater at MGH. John Collins Warren