Morton’s discovery of etherization was not a story easily assimilated into the narrative preferred by regulars. The possibility of painless surgery had not been discovered after years of empirical study, statistical analyses, and tested hypotheses by educated and reputable scientists. Rather, a poor dentist who was eager to improve his practice by advertising painless tooth extractions stumbled upon the possibility of ether-induced insensibility. Morton’s investigation into the safety and universality of etherization was rudimentary, and his experiments with different inhaling apparati were cursory. More disturbingly, Morton wanted to keep his discovery a secret, and he wanted to make money. He added perfumes and burned incense during the demonstrations in order to disguise the strong and well-known smell of ether, and he called the preparation Letheon Gas, thus avoiding all mention of what he knew was the only active ingredient. Morton also refused to consider his work part of a larger scientific effort. He insisted that the discovery was his alone, and he devoted his life to disproving the claims of others to earlier, related discoveries.
Since Morton’s story was more amenable to the irregulars’ narratives of breakthroughs by iconoclastic and untutored geniuses than the narratives regulars told of scientific progress, we might expect the elite, professional medical men in the United States to have shunned Morton and his attempts to promote himself and his product. And, in fact, many did denounce Morton, distancing themselves from the unprofessional and unseemly affair of patent disputes and the dangerous quackery of pain-free surgery. The editor of the Philadelphia Medical Examiner, Robert M. Huston, wrote, “We are persuaded that the surgeons of Philadelphia will not be seduced from the high professional path of duty, into the quagmire of quackery, by this Will-o’-the-wisp.” He warned that “If such things are to be sanctioned by the profession, there is little need of reform conventions, or any other efforts to elevate the professional character: physicians and quacks will soon constitute one fraternity.”14 Charles A. Lee, editor of the New York Journal of Medicine, suggested that Morton’s supporters were “stooping from the exalted position they occupy in the profession, to hold intercourse with, and become the abettors of, quackery.”15
But such attacks did not dissuade those among the medical elite of Boston who were determined to make Morton part of their story. Indeed, it was precisely Morton’s unprofessional image and story that made him appealing to the professionals. Acceptance of Morton was evidence that could testify both to the profession’s willingness to accept discoveries made by those outside the profession and, at the same time, to the profession’s dedication to ethics over profits. Those who defended Morton constructed a tale of a lucky and somewhat buffoonish dentist rescued from his misguided entrepreneurial schemes by an enlightened medical community.
Henry Bigelow was one of the first and most ardent defenders of Morton, and he linked his early career and professional status to Morton’s discovery. Although he had been recently appointed to the staff at Massachusetts General, Bigelow became the most public, persistent, and enthusiastic supporter of Morton and etherization. Two weeks after the first demonstration Bigelow proclaimed the advent of a new age in an address to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on November 3, and six days later, on November 9, he read a similar paper to the Boston Society of Medical Improvement. The publication of this paper, “Insensibility During Surgical Operation Produced by Inhalation,” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (which later became the New England Journal of Medicine) is commonly considered the first official announcement of the discovery of anesthesia.16 Two years later, in 1848, in the first issue of the journal of the newly formed American Medical Association, Bigelow published an account of the physiological effects of ether; and in 1848 he published Ether and Chloroform: A Compendium of Their History, Surgical Use, Dangers, and Discovery.17 Notably, in all these texts Bigelow celebrates not only the discovery but also the discoverer.
In order to champion the enterprising dentist and yet follow traditional narratives, Bigelow suggests that the story of the discovery of ether began long before Morton. He implies that Morton achieved what he did because the time was ripe and that “the early narrative of the discovery” reveals “the contemporaneous and accumulating evidence of experiment” (9).18 Bigelow writes Morton into a grand narrative that includes work done before Morton, experiments conducted after Morton’s demonstration, important responses from the European community, and the numerous trials and observations recorded by reputable scientists. Bigelow clearly believes that the exchange of ideas and results among scientists throughout the world was crucial to the eventual discovery of etherization, and he even makes the bickering that followed the first demonstration part of the larger story.
In addition to writing the dentist into a longer, larger history, Bigelow uses Morton to meditate upon the role of the professional in a democratic nation. Invoking the myths of American originality, freedom from narrow training, and bold disregard for conventions, Bigelow proclaims that the United States will produce the next generation of leaders in science. The inventor, according to Bigelow, displays a willingness to reject accepted wisdom, an almost bullheaded tenacity and perseverance, and an intuitive confidence in his own ideas. Bigelow intones the names of the nation’s great inventors—Franklin, Fulton, and Whitney—and adds Morton to the list. These men, he suggests, are evidence of “American ingenuity”—the nation’s greatest resource (18). But having linked Morton and his medical discovery to the men who invented the bifocal, the steamboat, and the cotton gin, Bigelow suggests there are also important differences between scientific knowledge and mechanical inventions. Science requires training, and when he envisions the future contributions the United States will make to science, he warns that this will only happen if there is a greater “opportunity for education in science and unmerchantable truth.” This education, Bigelow believes, will transform the “thousand nameless artisans” with a “humble genius” for invention into “true philosophers” (18). Thus Bigelow fashions a new nation out of the populist image of the United States as a land of natural inventors, suggesting that with a good education basement tinkerers will become leading scientists.
As Bigelow suggests that ingenuity and independent thinking are the nation’s greatest assets, so he also suggests that U.S. leadership in science will be a natural consequence of the nation’s political and economic structures. Seeking to win for U.S. scientists the same chauvinism that the U.S. political and economic systems enjoy, Bigelow notes that genius in science is often linked to genius in the political sphere. Central to Bigelow’s hagiographies of Franklin, Fulton, and Whitney as scientists are their political contributions.
Franklin was a reformer; Fulton a warm advocate of the principles of free trade; while Whitney . . . anticipated the decline and overthrow of all arbitrary governments, and the substitution in their place of a purely representative system like our own. (17)
Bifocals, steamboats, and cotton gins; reform, capitalism and democracy; these are the fruits of that “uncultivated gift”—American ingenuity (18). Ether, Bigelow suggests, is another. In twenty-seven pages, he constructs a history of discoveries and inventions from Jenner to Leverrier, from Galvani to Schonbein, that ends in Boston with a common dentist. Morton’s discovery, Bigelow insists, is evidence of what native ingenuity, a laissez-faire