October 16, 1846

Ether Day

Morton publicly administers ether during Warren’s operation on Gilbert Abbott

The famous “tumour removal” did not remove the mass: Warren exposed a tangle of vessels and passed a ligature beneath it.

16 October 1846, in the surgical amphitheatre

In the Massachusetts General Hospital amphitheatre — later called the Ether Dome — the Boston dentist William T. G. Morton administered inhaled ether to Gilbert Abbott on 16 October 1846, before the surgeon John Collins Warren operated beneath Abbott's jaw.

Morton supplied the inhalation apparatus and gave the ether; Warren performed the surgery.

Warren had postponed the operation three days earlier, on 13 October, because he had promised Morton a chance to test his proposed method of preventing surgical pain.

What the operative record says

The record describes an incision exposing a mass of large veins and small arteries, with Warren passing a ligature beneath it. The procedure was an attempted ligation of a congenital lymphovascular malformation, not the complete removal of a neck tumour.

A retrospective addition to Abbott's records says he appeared asleep after four or five minutes and did not shrink or cry out, but later moved his limbs and made sounds that observers read as possible signs of pain.

How convincing it looked at the time

After recovering, Abbott consistently said he had felt no pain, describing only a sensation resembling scraping with a blunt instrument.

Ether was used again at the hospital the next day, and Henry Jacob Bigelow regarded that second trial as a complete success, whereas the 16 October result was initially considered only moderately successful or suggestive. Bigelow's detailed report was published on 18 November 1846.

Warren's celebrated "Gentlemen, this is no humbug" is not securely documented in the contemporaneous operative record, and Crawford Long had used ether privately in Georgia from 1842 without publishing until 1849.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The date, place, participants and administration of ether are secure. What is disputed is how completely the October 16 trial demonstrated insensibility: Abbott denied pain, but he moved and vocalized during the procedure, and contemporary observers initially found the result less than definitive.
“First successful public demonstration” is the conventional description, not a claim that Morton was the first person ever to use ether surgically. Crawford Long had used ether privately in Georgia in 1842 but did not publish until 1849.
Warren’s famous “Gentlemen, this is no humbug” wording is not securely documented in the contemporaneous operative record and should be presented as reported tradition rather than a certain verbatim quotation.