Bigelow’s attempts to make these arguments are variously awkward and elegant, sometimes self-serving, sometimes illogical, and sometimes passionately democratic. Indeed, I begin with the ether texts precisely because they are conflicted and because I want the study of fiction’s response to medicine that I pursue in subsequent chapters to avoid the teleological habits that can bedevil efforts to read fiction in relation to history I hope to situate fiction’s meditations upon medicine and the body within a history that is attentive both to large patterns in medicine’s emerging authority and to the local debates and contests the outcomes of which neither physicians nor writers could know. As June Howard reminds us, when we read literary texts within historical contexts, the goal is not to set literary texts against a “history” or “reality” whose own textuality is for that purpose repressed.5 The ether texts are, I believe, particularly effective reminders of history’s textuality. They reveal the rocky terrain of contemporary medical discussions and the efforts of regulars to position professional medicine within and not against populist and egalitarian sentiments of the day.
The details of the discovery of etherization are difficult to discern amidst the various ideological uses that have been made of the story, but most accounts agree on a basic outline.6 Morton’s educational background included a brief course of study at the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, six months as a student and boarder with physician, chemist, and geologist Charles T. Jackson, and two lecture series at Massachusetts Medical College, where he met Dr. Warren and others on the staff at Massachusetts General Hospital. Morton first set up as a dentist in partnership with Horace Wells, but after an unsuccessful year he left Wells and worked alone. Morton was in frequent contact with Jackson, seeking advice about ingredients for a wide range of dental procedures, including deadening pain for tooth extraction, and in his partnership with Wells he probably learned about the use of nitrous oxide to reduce pain during dental surgery. According to his memoirs, Morton began experimenting with ether in the summer of 1846, and within a few months he realized that he had discovered something remarkable and applied immediately to Dr. Warren for permission to demonstrate a new compound that rendered patients insensible to pain.
Although Morton’s exhibitions at Massachusetts General were probably the first successful public demonstration of the anesthetic properties of ether, his claim to being the sole discoverer of etherization was contested. Jackson insisted that he gave Morton the idea of using ether as an inhalant, and he was the most persistent disputant in what became known as the “ether controversy” Jackson wrote articles on ether and was the first to announce the discovery in Europe, where he was honored by the Academie des Sciences. He persuaded Morton to guarantee him a share in the profits from the patent; and his lawyers persuaded a Congressional subcommittee to reject Morton’s request for an honorarium of one hundred thousand dollars. Horace Wells never mounted a legal challenge, but his work with nitrous oxide and his similar though less successful demonstrations in the same surgical theater two years earlier also cast a shadow on Morton’s claim to be the sole discoverer of anesthesia. In 1852, with the controversy still unsettled, a third disputant, Crawford W. Long, came forward and claimed to be the discoverer of inhalant anesthesia. In 1854 the Senate passed a bill to honor and compensate Morton, but the House rejected it on the grounds that “the multiplicity of claimants” made it impossible to grant an award.7 Morton appealed to the president, and he was promised that if he filed a suit against the government for violating his patent by using ether during the Mexican-American War without compensating him, the government would “shoulder all the responsibility” and offer Morton an appropriate reward.8 Eight years later Morton’s suit was dismissed on the grounds that the patent was not valid, and he died in 1868, poor but still defending his claims and preparing another suit against Jackson.
Most accounts of the ether controversy focus on the story just outlined. By sorting through the papers of Morton, Wells, Jackson, and Long, the evidence submitted to Congress, legal briefs, and related documents, historians have tried to name the true discoverer of anesthesia. I want to suggest, however, that the most noteworthy feature of the ether controversy was not the dispute over priority,9 but the surprising number of physicians, including some of the most prestigious, who championed the beleaguered dentist, defended his efforts to win compensation, and enthusiastically advocated etherization before thorough testing indicated it was safe and effective. In the decade and a half following Morton’s demonstrations at Massachusetts General, Henry Bigelow wrote several articles supporting Morton and etherization, and the popular magazine Littell’s Living Age published a defense of Morton authorized by the trustees of the hospital. In addition, physicians in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia counseled Morton to appeal to the president, circulated a testimonial on his behalf, requested donations to offset his loss of income while pursuing his claim, and commissioned a biography that celebrated him as the sole discoverer of anesthesia. For some in the medical profession, telling Morton’s story became away to fashion their own story, a story of an enlightened, liberal, and ethical profession open to the discoveries of the untutored genius and yet devoted to protecting the nation from charlatans.
Defending Morton was not, however, so easy. A self-promoting opportunist eager to protect his pecuniary interests, Morton was an embarrassment to the idea of professionalism as many physicians wanted to construct it, and the history of his discovery—a story of luck and coincidence—did not conform to the conventions of more traditional histories of scientific progress. According to elite physicians, medical knowledge was gained only by the slow and painstaking accumulation of precise observations. In introductory lectures at medical schools and addresses to medical societies, the medical elite adopted a tone of impersonal reserve and constructed narratives not of individual geniuses, but of collaborative efforts that slowly and carefully added to the store of medical facts. The Paris-trained Philadelphia physician Alfred Stille, for example, prefaced his textbook, Elements of General Pathology (1848), with an essay on “Medical Truth” in which he equated the “dreams of genius” with “the frauds of charlatanism.”10 Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his lectures on “Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions” (1842), insisted that real advances were made only after years of work by highly trained men who cared little for fame and money. For Holmes, William Harvey and Edward Jenner were examples of the selfless men whose hard work was essential to the progress of medicine. Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood was the “legitimate result of his severe training and patient study,” and Jenner’s discovery of a smallpox vaccination was the culmination of “twenty-two years of experiment and researches” that he offered “unpurchased, to the public.”11 For Stille, Holmes, and others, true scientific knowledge was untainted by the petty squabbles, self-serving secrecy, and careless errors that inevitably marred the work of ambitious men seeking glory or profit.
The emphasis on painstaking, collaborative, empirical research in such accounts of medical progress allowed regulars to distinguish themselves from irregulars who told