awaited Morton, almost losing patience and proceeding in the usual
barbaric manner. With Morton making the finishing touches on the device,
he appeared fifteen minutes late on the appointed morning. The long,
narrow stone steps all the way to the top of the hospital demanded one last
challenge for the young medical student, and there seems little doubt that
he arrived, gasping for breath before a large audience of skeptics whose
appetites were whetted for another debacle, another humbug remedy.
Morton quickly went to work, readying the contraption and positioning
the mouthpiece in front of the nervous patient. He ordered Abbot to
breathe, and within minutes, he was asleep. On that late New England fall
morning, with daylight flooding through the glass panes above and
Harvard students leaning in from the steep and narrow rows, Morton
nodded to the regal surgeon, “Sir, your patient is ready.”
Five weeks later, Warren’s report on that glorious morning was
published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Dr. Warren wrote
that after three minutes the patient “sank into a state of insensibility. I
immediately made an incision about three inches long through the skin of
the neck, and began a dissection among important nerves and blood-
vessels without any expression of pain on the part of the patient ... being
asked immediately afterward whether he had suffered much, he said that
he had felt as if his neck had been scratched.”^21
While it may be apocryphal, Warren is believed to have finished his
operation, calmly looked up at the silent crowd and stated, “Gentlemen,
this is no humbug.”
Warren’s article outlined the additional cases performed over the
following three weeks under the control of ether anesthesia. He concluded
that there was a “decided mitigation of pain,” and that the medicine’s
effects upon the body “soon pass off without leaving any distinct traces
behind them.” His last sentence of the publication is wonderful: “Let me
conclude by congratulating my professional brethren on the acquisition of
a mode of mitigating human suffering, which may become a valuable
agent in the hands of careful and well-instructed practitioners, even if it
should not prove of such general application as the imagination of
sanguine persons would lead them to anticipate.”
This was the publication that Crawford Long read down in Jefferson,
Georgia, now four and a half years after his initial use of ether anesthesia.
Thus, his panic.