Abstract
To the Editor.— A small but important correction must be made in the otherwise delightful discussion by M. Therese Southgate, MD, 1 of Thomas Eakins' painting The Agnew Clinic , which appeared on the May 23/30, 1986, JAMA cover. While the anesthetist in the picture is correctly identified as a young house officer, and the anesthetic is undoubtedly ether, Dr Southgate errs in referring to the method as open-drop. The Agnew Clinic accurately records an earlier and cruder method of etherization, which used a paper cone stuffed with cotton. Instead of being dripped in a continuous process, ether was poured into the cotton before the cone was placed over the face. 2 This one-shot method worked well in the era before asepsis, when surgery was short and superficial. Eakins has clearly depicted a white paper cone in the left hand of the anesthetist. In his earlier painting, The Gross Clinic , Eakins
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