Who demonstrated the first public surgical use of ether anesthesia in 1846?

William T. G. Morton demonstrated the first public surgical use of ether anesthesia in 1846.

On 16 October 1846, Morton administered ether to a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Surgeon John Collins Warren then removed a tumor from the patient’s neck while he remained unconscious and did not show the usual signs of surgical pain.

The demonstration, held in the hospital’s Ether Dome, helped convince physicians that major operations could be performed without the patient enduring extreme pain. It is widely treated as the beginning of modern surgical anesthesia.

Crawford Long had used ether during surgery in Georgia in 1842, before Morton’s demonstration, but he did not publish his work promptly. Horace Wells experimented with nitrous oxide, while chloroform became another important anesthetic later in the nineteenth century.