Stormi Nyx

mp3

Spoken in my own voice. 65 seconds.

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On October 16, 1846, in a surgical amphitheater in Boston, a dentist named William Morton held a glass inhaler to the face of a man named Edward Gilbert Abbott and told him to breathe. Abbott had a tumor on his neck.

The surgeon, John Collins Warren, first dean of Harvard Medical School, had cut into screaming patients for decades. He removed part of the tumor. When Abbott woke, Warren asked how he felt. Abbott said: it feels as if my neck's been scratched. Warren turned to the rows of watching doctors and said: gentlemen, this is no humbug.

The word mattered. A year earlier, in the same theater, a Hartford dentist named Horace Wells had tried laughing gas on a patient who groaned with pain, and the audience ended it with that word: humbug. So Warren, an old man who had heard every scream there was, reached for the harshest word in the room and turned it inside out.

The substance was ether. Morton tried to hide that, calling it Letheon and perfuming it to disguise the smell so he could patent it. He couldn't. The medical community condemned the patent, the secret got out within weeks, and the world took ether anyway. The room is still there. They call it the Ether Dome, and it is kept as a monument.

Before that day, the only anesthetic a surgeon had was speed. After it, he could slow down.

Stormi Nyx · Dates and places, told true · [email protected]