ONE OF THE TRULY GREAT MOMENTS IN MEDICAL history occurred on a tense fall morning in the surgical amphitheater of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. It was there, on October 16, 1846, that a dentist named William T. G. Morton administered an effective anesthetic to a surgical patient. Consenting to what became a most magnificent scientific revolution were John Warren, an apprehensive surgeon, and Glenn Abbott, an even more nervous young man about to undergo removal of a vascular tumor on the left side of his neck. Both Warren and Abbott sailed through the procedure painlessly, although some have noted that Abbott moved a bit near the end. Turning away from the operating table toward the gallery packed with legitimately dumbstruck medical students, Warren gleefully exclaimed, “Gentlemen, this is no humbug!” Morton named his “creation” Letheon, after the Lethe river of Greek mythology. Drinking its waters, the ancients contended, erased painful memories. Hardly such an exotic elixir, Morton’s stuff was actually sulphuric ether. Regardless of composition, Letheon inspired a legion of enterprising surgeons to devise and execute an armamentarium of lifesaving, invasive procedures. Yet while the discovery of anesthesia was a bona fide blessing for humankind, it hardly turned out to be that great for either its “discoverer,” William Morton, or the Hollywood director Preston Sturges, who, a century later, decided to make a film about it. Morton began his dental studies in Baltimore in 1840. Two years later he set up practice in Hartford, ultimately working with a dentist named Horace Wells. At this time, surgeons could offer patients little beyond opium and alcohol to endure the agonizing pain engendered by scalpels. From the late 18th century well into the 1840s, physicians and chemists experimented with agents such as nitrous oxide, ether, carbon dioxide, and other mind-altering chemicals without success. In an era before the adoption of daily dental hygiene and fluoride treatments, excruciating tooth extractions were also a common part of the human experience. Consequently, dentists joined the holy grail–like search for substances to conquer operative pain. Around this time, Morton and Wells conducted experiments using nitrous oxide, including a demonstration at Harvard Medical School in 1845 that failed to completely squelch the pain of a student submitting to a tooth-pulling, thus publicly humiliating the dentists. Although Morton and Wells amicably dissolved their partnership, Morton continued his search for anesthetic agents. A year earlier, in 1844, during studies at Harvard Medical School (which were cut short by financial difficulties), Morton attended the lectures of chemistry professor Charles Jackson. One was on how the common organic solvent sulphuric ether could render a person unconscious and even insensate. Recalling these lessons during the summer of 1846, Morton purchased bottles of the stuff from his local chemist and began exposing himself and a menagerie of pets to ether fumes. Satisfied with its safety and reliability, he began using ether on his dental patients. Soon, mobs of toothaching, dollar-waving Bostonians made their way to his office. Morton relished his financial success but quickly perceived that Letheon was good for far more than pulling teeth. Morton’s remarkable demonstration at the Massachusetts General Hospital transmogrified his status from profitable dentist to internationally acclaimed healer. But the halflife of his celebrity turned out to be molto presto, followed by an interminable period of infamy. In particular, he was lambasted for insisting on applying for an exclusive patent on Letheon. In the United States of the mid-19th century it was considered unseemly, if not greedy, for members of the medical profession to profit from discoveries that universally benefited humankind, particularly from a patent for what turned out to be the easily acquired sulphuric ether. As long as he stuck to dentistry, many physicians argued, Morton could do as he liked; but if he desired acceptance of Letheon by physicians and surgeons, he needed to comply with what they considered their higher-minded ideals and ethics. Morton aggressively rejected all such suggestions, much to his detriment. There was also the issue of credit. Horace Wells demanded his share. So did Crawford W. Long, a Georgia practitioner who claimed to have used nitrous oxide and ether as early as 1842 but who was too