Bigelow’s paean to the partnership of medical science and democracy is heartfelt, but it is not without problems. The definitions of democracy and professionalism available to Bigelow in the 1840s were in tension, and he cannot, despite his best efforts, completely reconcile his vision of professional medical science with the radical rhetoric of the Jacksonian era. Bigelow’s troubles are most evident in the confusion that marks his discussion of the role of incredulity in science.
According to Bigelow, incredulity is the essential trait of all discoverers, and it is a virtue promoted by democracy and laissez-faire capitalism. Incredulity may come from “knowledge or ignorance,” a crucial caveat that enables Bigelow to include Morton with those more often considered geniuses, but it always indicates a “philosophic mind [that] proposes to think for itself” (15). Such independent thought, however, was precisely what regulars would not tolerate, according to their challengers. Regulars seemed unwilling to countenance the skepticism of irregulars, and irregulars often charged the medical establishment with intolerance to new ideas and alternative therapeutics and theories. And, in fact, Bigelow balances his celebration of independent thinking with a warning about the dangers of unchecked incredulity. He cautions that “incredulity, brought to bear upon an extended system, especially the inexact sciences, is justly viewed with suspicion” and that “the world therefore justly maintains a degree of conservatism and immobility” (15). Although radical incredulity may be appropriate in the physical sciences and the mechanical arts, in medicine, Bigelow insists, we must temper such incredulity and depend upon the conservative check of a professional class of educated, experienced men. In medicine, the unsuspecting patient must be protected from the irresponsible independent thinking of practitioners who dismiss what has become accepted knowledge and practice. In other words, Bigelow reneges on his attempts to link medical science to a radical, independent democratic spirit. He claims that although medicine may advance through discoveries made by renegades and untutored minds, progress depends upon a professional class of men who can be counted on to regulate the practice of medicine and thus protect patients from practitioners who might discard the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the profession.19
Bigelow’s version of Morton’s story—a reassuring tale in which an untutored American inventor is guided by noble, far-sighted professional men—was the tale circulated, authorized, and funded by the medical establishment. In 1848, at the request of the trustees of Massachusetts General Hospital, Richard Dana published in Littell’s Living Age “A History of the Ether Discovery,” an exhaustive account of the legal battles over priority, patents, and public recognition. Ten years later Nathan P. Rice published a hagiography of Morton, Trials of a Public Benefactor. Rice was hired by the “Committee to draft a Testimonial to William T. G. Morton,” which met in the home of Bigelow’s father, Dr. Jacob Bigelow. Dr. James Jackson and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes presided and the meetings were attended by many of the leading physicians of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and well-known literary men such as Henry W. Longfellow, William Prescott, and James T. Fields.20 Although both Dana’s and Rice’s accounts admit much of what Bigelow omits—the story of Morton’s life and the unseemly details of the long, contentious legal battles over priority claims, they ultimately echo Bigelow’s version. Morton represents the independent, inventive American spirit, and the physicians represent the wisdom, care, and foresight offered by educated professional men. Rice’s account, for example, makes it clear that the medical profession is the hero and Morton is a madman who made a lucky discovery. He juxtaposes roll calls of the faculty at Harvard Medical School and the work of these men with Morton’s work as a dentist. While the professors of medicine study and teach anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and surgery, Morton devotes his time to making false teeth, to cosmetic surgery, and—his greatest work before ether—to making a false nose attached to spectacles, with a beauty mark on the forehead to distract attention from the nose.
Within a few years, the ether histories told by Bigelow, Dana, and Rice had been widely circulated, and the discovery of ether had become institutionalized as a national tale, featuring a common, quirky dentist and wise professional men. The popular press was attentive to the story. Almost immediately after the first demonstration, the Boston Daily Advertiser ran Bigelow’s paper in its entirety, the New York Times covered the congressional hearings; and in 1853 Sarah Hale published a shortened version of Dana’s report in Godey’s Lady’s Book.21 By the end of the century, the story had become a legend. In 1882 Robert Hinckley began planning an oil painting of the first surgery under ether, and he devoted eleven years to creating a suitable homage to the leading physicians of Massachusetts. Hinckley researched carefully who attended Morton’s demonstration, though in the end he decided to include several luminaries who were not present, and he sought Bigelow’s opinion before the painting was finished. Bigelow replied to Hinckley’s request and the photograph of the painting that Hinckley included with a lengthy letter that suggests making Morton and another figure shorter and making Bigelow one-eighth of an inch taller. Bigelow also gives precise instructions about modifying his clothing, noting that “I had all my clothes from Paris, & that was then the way of making them.”22 Although the painting has not earned much acclaim and it moved about for several years, it now hangs in the Francis A. Countway Library of Harvard Medical School. A few years later, in 1891, Dr. Richard Manning Hodges published A Narrative of Events Connected with the Introduction of Sulphuric Ether into Surgical Uses, and on the fiftieth anniversary of Morton’s first demonstration, McClure’s Magazine published an account by Morton’s wife.23 Hodges draws directly upon the histories by Bigelow, Dana, and Rice, and he tells essentially the same story: Morton is lucky, intuitive and entrepreneurial, and he rightly defers at the crucial moments to the superior knowledge and ethical standards of Bigelow and the medical profession. The tale begins with Morton—his “common-school education” and his work as a clerk and salesman—and it concludes with a tribute to Bigelow’s “determination, his penetration into actuating motives, his executive ability,—in fact, all his sagacious and active qualities of mind and body.”24 Morton is courageous, persevering, but a man of “no extraordinary degree of scientific attainment,” and the physicians and trustees of Massachusetts General are men of “discretion and moral courage.”25
Twentieth-century versions of the ether story take the same shape.26 As recently as 1988, in a history of famous doctors, Sherwin Nuland describes Morton and the other claimants as a “handful of alert artisans, almost all of whom were enterprising mechanics, but certainly not scientists,” and he describes Warren as an “austere, highly skilled physician . . . one of the country’s most revered senior physicians.”27 Nuland concludes that it was Warren’s “ineluctable destiny to be the medium” through which ether was presented to the world. In short, the ether story has been told again and again in order to suggest that an established class of elite professionals is not anathema to the nation’s democratic ideals. In fact, as I suggest in Chapter 4, it was not only the ether story that was pressed to do this work. Elite literary magazines in the nineteenth century offered similar portraits of the professional physician as a liberal, open-minded democrat, a man poised to dispense wise counsel to temper democracy’s excesses.
Morton’s story not only inspired Bigelow and others to fashion an image of professional medicine that countered charges of elitism, it also challenged regulars to articulate their relationship to the marketplace. Morton wanted to make money on his discovery, and only ten days after the first demonstration at Massachusetts General he applied for a patent. He then placed advertisements in newspapers and magazines and printed handbills in order to announce a price schedule for Letheon licenses. Four weeks later, on November 20, Morton publicly announced his patent claim, and he warned all persons “against making any infringement on the same.” Two weeks later his warning was sterner:
certain unprincipled persons have, in the face of Law and Justice, without any license, instructions or authority from me whatever, used my name and attempted to Pirate said invention, endangering, from their want of skill and knowledge upon the