ETHER AS ANESTHESIA

During the 1800s, the use of anesthesia was an afterthought as doctors were still perfecting surgical methods. Though there was speculation that ether was used as anesthesia as early as 1842 by Dr. Crawford Long, Boston dentist William Thomas Green Morton had the first recorded successful use of sulfuric ether. After many trials on animals and even himself, Morton was able to extract a tooth with from a man named Ebenezer Hopkins Frost using inhaled sulfuric ether. He then, publicly demonstrated his use of ether at Massachusetts General Hospital on Edward Gilbert Abbott on October 16, 1846. This medical landmark led surgeons across the globe to use ether for their surgeries.

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However, though ether was widely adopted by many surgeons, not everyone was able to receive anesthesia during their operations. During this time, the gynecological field was still being developed and was stigmatized by most physicians. Most of the known women’s health issues were regarded as treatable by midwives, who were looked down upon by other medical professionals. Doctors were reluctant to treat minorities with anesthesia, especially women, women of color, immigrant women and working-class women. The substance that allowed for patients to become unconscious during procedures and, therefore, not feel pain, was used on non-white women sparingly.

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 In this era, as slavery was still prominent, enslaved women were denied the use of anesthesia as it was believed that African American women had high pain tolerances and were able to handle pain better than white women. These beliefs were supported by the fact that, when white women had unanesthetized procedures done to them, they weren’t able to have the procedure completed, whereas the opposite was true for enslaved women. Enslaved women by the names of Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy, were just a few of the many women that were denied the use of anesthesia during experimental procedures, even after the discovery of ether. In the years that followed its successful use, ether was still used selectively on patients based on certain social characteristics. Now, beliefs have shifted and the use of ether as an anesthetic has diminished. The anesthesia that was birthed in this age has since developed and is used in a majority of surgical procedures performed today.

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Sources:

Board, Ernest. (1912). The First Use of Ether in Dental Surgery [painting]. Retrieved from https://wellcomecollection.org/works/nyt37bss.

Boland, F. K. (2009). The first anesthetic: the story of Crawford Long. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press.

Chang, C. Y., Goldstein, E., Agarwal, N., & Swan, K. G. (2015). Ether in the developing world: rethinking an abandoned agent. BMC anesthesiology, 15, 149. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12871-015-0128-3

Ryan LeVasseur, Sukumar P. Desai; Ebenezer Hopkins Frost (1824–1866): William T.G. Morton's First Identified Patient and Why He Was Invited to the Ether Demonstration of October 16, 1846. Anesthesiology 2012;117(2):238-242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1097/ALN.0b013e31825f01b7

​The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology. (1846). “Ether.” Retrieved from https://www.woodlibrarymuseum.org/museum/item/657/ether

Wolf, Jacqueline H. Deliver Me from Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.