Errors in Recognizing Priority in Behavioral Neuroscience and Mesmerism's Surprising Role in the Discovery of Modern Anesthesia

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Abstract Those who achieve priority in science for discovery or originality enjoy public recognition and even fame (e.g., Nobel Prizes since 1901), yet errors in the recognition of priority are common. This study begins with a brief discussion of 6 such recognition errors that are related directly to behavioral neuroscience, before considering a seventh one, the complicated but very instructive case of the first use of ether in surgical anesthesia. Fenster (2001) described the first use of anesthetic ether for surgery as “America's greatest medical discovery,” and Friedman and Friedland (1998) included it among “medicine's ten greatest discoveries.” Anesthesia has also been medicine's most controversial case of priority dispute, and this controversy continues today. Many historians of medicine, and some historians of psychology (including E. G. Boring), have wrongly credited William T. G. Morton with the first use of anesthetic ether in 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Some have also unjustifiably discredited the importance of ether's use in 1842 by Dr. Crawford W. Long in Georgia, but a few correctly give priority for the first surgical use of ether to Long. To understand the persistence of this priority dispute in history of medicine, history of psychology is used to understand how mesmerism became a confounding variable that obliged Long to delay the announcement of his successful use of anesthetic ether until he had performed several decisive surgeries. This case is considered at length because it teaches important lessons about how priority in science is recognized and remembered.