ACHIEVEMENTS OF SURGERY 427 



istration, the anesthesia was incomplete, and the students 

 cruelly hooted him out of the arena as a fakir. This seems to 

 have broken Dr. Wells's nerve and spirit. He died by his own 

 hand a few years later. 



Just at this time the dentists of the United States were 

 organized as a special class of medical practitioners, and great 

 improvements were made, especially in the use, application 

 and manufacture of false teeth and plates containing a number 

 of teeth. One of Horace Wells's students or associates, Wil- 

 liam Thomas Green Morton, who had studied dentistry at 

 Baltimore and medicine with Dr. Charles T. Jackson in Boston, 

 made such improvements in plates of false teeth as relieved 

 them of many of their undesirable appearances, but required 

 the removal of any underlying roots. The use of his invention, 

 then, was hindered by the pain which attended the extraction 

 of these roots. To obviate the pain he tried various local ap- 

 plications, and incidentally observed that ether, which had 

 been recommended by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, when used 

 locally and in sufficient quantities to evaporate and to be in- 

 haled produced a general narcosis. He extracted many roots 

 with great success under an anesthesia produced by the in- 

 halation of ether vapor. The ether had been manufactured 

 and rendered pure, robbed of the deleterious effects of the 

 original product by a method which had been invented by 

 Dr. Jackson. After a series of experiments on animals and 

 its use in the extraction of teeth. Dr. John Collins Warren was 

 induced to operate upon a patient in the Massachusetts gen- 

 eral hospital on October 16, 1846, with the patient anesthet- 

 ized by Dr. Morton with ether produced by Dr. Jackson's 

 method. At the close of this operation Dr. Warren, probably 

 in memory of Dr. Wells's failure a year and a half before, an- 

 nounced to the astonished class ''Gentlemen, this is no hum- 

 bug." The success of this operation was quickly carried to 

 all parts of the world, and on December 19th the first ether 

 was administered in England, and a few days later in France. 

 It developed at once that many other experimenters had ob- 

 tained greater or less success in the use of general anesthetics. 

 Dr. Crawford W. Long, of Danielsville, Georgia, had removed 

 a small tumor from a negro's neck under a general anesthetic 



