biography
| name: |
Morton, William (Thomas Green)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1819–68)
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| biography:
| Dentist and anaesthetist, born in Charlton, Massachusetts, USA. He studied dentistry in Baltimore and practised in Connecticut before setting up a dental practice in Boston (1842), in partnership with Horace Wells, who had been experimenting with nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas’) as an anaesthesia while removing teeth. But in 1844, at the suggestion of his landlord, Professor Charles T Jackson, Morton first used sulphuric ether to anaesthetize a patient before drilling a tooth. After experiments on himself, a goldfish, and his dog, he used it during a tooth extraction (Sep 1846). The subsequent newspaper report caught the attention of a Massachusetts General Hospital surgeon, Dr John Warren, who sponsored several surgical demonstrations with Morton as anaesthetist. At first he tried to keep secret the nature of his anaesthesia, calling it ‘letheon’, but to receive a patent he was forced to describe it in a medical journal. Morton soon found himself in conflict with not only Wells and Jackson but also Crawford W Long of Georgia over the issue of priority, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to establish himself as the discoverer of ether and in trying to profit from its use. He died a poor man, but he came to be recognized as the first to introduce ether into general use as an anaesthetic. |
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