Ether monument in Boston - an unexpected dedication from grateful people (8 photos)

In a corner of Boston's Public Garden, near the intersection of Arlington and Marlborough Streets, stands a little-known monument dedicated to a medical breakthrough: the use of ether as an anesthetic. At the top of the monument is a sculpture depicting the famous biblical story of the Good Samaritan helping an injured stranger he met on the road.





The first public demonstration of ether as an anesthetic was made at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 by Boston dentist William Thomas Green Morton and physician John Collins Warren. Morton administered ether, after which Warren removed a tumor from the neck of an unconscious patient.



William Morton

News of the successful demonstration spread throughout the world. It was hailed as the end of "the time when surgery was torture, and when serious surgery was feared as much as death itself." Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach, a 19th-century surgeon, declared: "Pain, the highest consciousness of our earthly existence, the most acute sense of the imperfections of our body, must bow before the power of the human mind, before the power of the etheric vapors."





Ether Monument

The Ether Monument was erected amid much controversy. Morton wanted credit for discovering ether, but several doctors objected. Morton's own professor, chemist Charles T. Jackson, insisted that he was the one mixing the chemicals Morton used in surgery. Therefore, he should get the credit.



Horace Wells, a dentist from Hartford, Connecticut, also claimed to have created anesthesia using nitrous oxide two years earlier, but when asked to publicly demonstrate its effects, he failed. It is now well known that Crawford Long of Georgia had been using ether in surgery since 1842, long before Morton, but he did so privately and did not publish his results or make them known to the medical community.



Mark Twain spoke out against Morton in no uncertain terms. He wrote that "there is a monument in Boston to a man who... stole another man's discovery... The monument is made of durable stuff, but the lies it tells will outlive it a million years." Twain was not quite right, because the ether monument does not mention any of the contenders, but is solely a monument to the first effective public demonstration of ether anesthesia.



The monument itself, about 12 meters high, was made by the Boston architect William Robert Ware. It was commissioned twenty years after Morton's famous operation by a private individual named Thomas Lee. The figure crowning the monument was made by the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward.