History of general anesthesia

Reported ether anesthesia for Miss Hobbie's tooth extraction

The apparatus was not a machine but a towel soaked in ether — and the story did not reach print until 1881, four decades later.

January 1842, in Rochester

According to a history first published in 1881, the medical student William E. Clarke administered ether from a towel to a young woman identified as Miss Hobbie, in Rochester, New York, in January 1842.

While she was insensible, Elijah Pope extracted one of her teeth, reportedly without pain. Clarke gave the ether; Pope did the dentistry.

Clarke was associated with Berkshire Medical College during the winter of 1841–42 and had experience of recreational ether inhalation — the "ether frolics" of the period.

The evidence is a memory

No contemporaneous clinical report has been found, and Miss Hobbie has never been securely identified; her name survives in two spellings, Hobbie or Hobby.

The account comes from Henry Munson Lyman's Artificial Anaesthesia and Anaesthetics, published in 1881.

Later histories say Clarke's mentor E. M. Moore attributed the unconsciousness to hysteria and discouraged further experiments.

Three different firsts

The episode was neither published at the time nor developed into a repeatable clinical practice, so it had no documented immediate effect on medicine.

It is a candidate for the earliest use of inhaled ether in a dental operation, not an uncontested priority claim: Crawford Long used ether during removal of neck cysts on 30 March 1842, and William Morton demonstrated ether publicly at Massachusetts General Hospital on 16 October 1846.

The article filed under this date is about William Osler, who was not born until 1849.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1842-01.

What the sources leave uncertain

No exact day is established; January 1842 comes from Henry M. Lyman's 1881 account.
No contemporaneous clinical report has been found, Miss Hobbie has not been securely identified, and the attribution rests on later historical testimony.
The episode is consequently a candidate for the earliest use of inhaled ether in a dental operation, not an uncontested priority claim.
Crawford Long's documented surgical use on 30 March 1842 and William Morton's successful public demonstration on 16 October 1846 represent different priority claims.