Figure 1-5 A, Gardner Q. Colton was born in Georgia, Vermont, and studied medicine briefly at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. His demonstrations of nitrous oxide inhalations were the spark that prompted Horace Wells and William T. G. Morton to use gas inhalation for relief of surgical pain. After a long and adventurous career, he died at age 84 in Rotterdam, Holland. B, William T. G. Morton was born in 1819 on a farm near Charlton, Massachusetts. After several business failures, he studied at the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, and in 1842 entered into a partnership in Boston with another dentist, Horace Wells. This partnership was dissolved within a year on amicable terms. During this association, the two dentists had devised a new method for fitting dentures that required removal of all the diseased teeth, a prohibitively painful procedure for most patients. Morton experimented with laudanum and opium without success, and in proceeding with his investigations, he realized that a greater knowledge of medicine was essential for further success. He briefly entered Harvard Medical School while continuing a part-time dental practice. During the summer of 1844, Morton, on the advice of Charles T. Jackson, used sulfuric ether for painless tooth extractions, and the study of this agent eventually led to his successful demonstration of ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846. The remainder of Morton's life was spent in efforts to patent and receive a monetary recognition for the discovery of ether anesthesia. Broken and despondent, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in New York City in July 1868. (Images courtesy of the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, Park Ridge, IL.)