ABSTRACT

A little over a decade after the deaths of Bentham and Coleridge, the history of pain underwent its most profound disruption. On 16 October 1846 the head of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, John Collins Warren, grudgingly delayed the start of an operation to remove a tumour from a young man's jaw, in order to permit a hucksterish and unpunctual dentist ‘in a fancy waistcoat’ to treat the patient with a drug supposedly of his own devising. The substance was in fact the vapour of liquid ether—which was already widely available and well known to have psychoactive properties— disguised with ‘essence of herbs’ and ‘pink cooking dye.’ The dentist was William Morton, who possessed a little training as a doctor, virtually none as a chemist, and considerable chutzpah; he succeeded in producing analgesia in the patient safely for the duration of the operation. 1