On Friday, Oct. 16, 1846, William Thomas Green Morton changed the world of medicine with his demonstration of vaporized ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston.
The discovery and public demonstration of ether anesthesia was not a sudden achievement, though. In fact, it was the results of incremental scientific gains by dozens of scientists from Raymond Lully, the Spanish alchemist who first distilled sulfuric ether in 1275, to Joseph Priestly, the English