Before the Commissioner of Patents, in the matter of extension of letters patent of the United States, granted to William T.G. Morton, on the 12th day of November, 1946, for "An improvement in surgical operations" : statement and account, pursuant to section eighteen of the Act of Congress, passed July 4, 1836.

  • Morton, W. T. G. (William Thomas Green), 1819-1868.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Before the Commissioner of Patents, in the matter of extension of letters patent of the United States, granted to William T.G. Morton, on the 12th day of November, 1946, for "An improvement in surgical operations" : statement and account, pursuant to section eighteen of the Act of Congress, passed July 4, 1836. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    which he was able to find tending to throw light upon 15 the matter, and by examination of them, learned that sulphuric ether was a powerful anti-spasmodic anodyne and narcotic capable cf producing, when inhaled, in- toxication and stupefaction. Your said applicant, there- fo:c, proceeded to verify the information thus obtained by a variety of experiments upon birds and other animals, these investigations occupying much of his time during the year 1844. None of these experiments proved 16 successful to any satisfactory degree, but soon after, in the winter of 1844:—1845, your said applicant, while still speculating upon the causes of these failures and the probable means to be adopted to realize practically the result which his investigations convinced him could be accomplished, found himself embarrassed by his lack of the requisite medical knowledge to prosecute said re- searches understandiugly, and joined the medical school of Harvard University, in Massachusetts, for the pur- 17 pose of acquiring such knowledge, and while attending lectures in the winter before referred to, witnessed an exhibition, before the class of which he was a member, of an application of nitrous-oxide gas for the purpose of extracting a tooth without pain. The attempt failed, but it served to impel your said applicant to renewed exer- tion, and in view of the statement contained in the works before referred to, that ether could be inhaled so as to produce stupefaction, and aided by the experiment with 18 the nitrous-oxide, which had furnished to him an in- stance in a human subject of inhalation of an agent some- what analogous, he determined to make trial upon him- self of the quantity of ether which lie believed could be inhaled without injury even wdien carried to complete insensibility, and to ascertain whether such an insensi- bility could be produced by this mode of administering