Aftermath

It is remarkable that without more explicit instructions or an actual demonstration by one of the Boston group, ether anesthesia was adopted so rapidly around the world. Only 63 days after the Morton demonstration, ether was administered in England by James Robinson (1813–1862), a prominent London dentist, for extraction of a deep-seated molar in a 13-year-old girl. Robinson had learned of ether anesthesia through a letter shown to him by a neighboring friend, Francis Boott, who had received the letter from Jacob Bigelow, father of Henry Bigelow, describing the effects of ether inhalation. Robinson devised a new inhaler and wrote the first textbook on anesthesia, which was published in London on March 1, 1847.^[121] Two days after Robinson's use of ether, Robert Liston (1794–1847) performed the first operation in England—a leg amputation at University College Hospital, London—with ether as the anesthetic delivered by William Squire. Within a few months, ether anesthesia had spread to the European continent. Nikolai Ivanovitch Pirogoff (1810–1881) used ether in St. Petersburg as early as February 1847, and he wrote a treatise on the subject.^[122] Of significant importance for the widespread use of ether was the prestige of the Boston surgeons, who firmly supported its legitimacy.

Many who tried to administer the anesthetic did so without proper preparation, and failures were common. Several questions remained unanswered. Bigelow's article was vague about how it should be administered, simply describing a number of cases with the use of Morton's inhaler. How the ether was supposed to be administered after the loss of consciousness was not addressed.

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