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Another
dispute, meanwhile, was brewing in the medical world. Painless surgery was an unimaginable gift. Before the
discovery of ether’s anesthetic properties, surgery was carried
out on conscious patients, roped to operating tables to minimize
movement. Even
though surgery was the only hope for saving their lives, many
patients preferred death, by nontreatment or even suicide.
Physicians and surgeons were outraged that painless surgery might
not be freely available to those in need.
Was it ethical to take out a patent on something so crucial
to public welfare? And
could a common substance such as ether even be
patented?
In fact, the patent did collapse.
Ether was ruled not to be a new compound.
It thus could not be patented.
Morton then requested an award of $100,000 from Congress for
the US Army’s battlefield use of his invention, etherisation.
Jackson protested. Morton had his supporters in Congress, Jackson had his
supporters. Horace
Wells (who had reentered the picture, claiming that without his
failed experiment with inhaled laughing gas, neither Jackson nor
Morton would have thought of using ether as an inhalation
anesthesia) had his supporters.
A new claim was made on behalf of southern physician Crawford
Long who had, without realizing the significance of his experiment,
documented the use of ether in minor surgery before either Jackson
or Morton.
The matter was investigated, it was debated, it was submitted and
resubmitted and finally, never determined.
Horace Wells died an early suicide after becoming addicted to
an even newer anesthetic, chloroform.
Crawford Long had no interest in pursuing his claim in a political
or public forum. He
enjoyed a long and useful career as a practicing physician in
Georgia.
William Morton continued to petition, to file lawsuits, to lecture.
In the summer of 1868, outraged by an article in the Atlantic Monthly which gave full credit for the invention of
ether to Jackson, a debt-ridden Morton traveled to New York, then in
the middle of a deadly heat wave, where he died of “congestion of
the brain,” age 48.
Charles Jackson, cushioned by his family inheritance, continued to
work as a chemist and a surveyor.
In 1873, at age 67, after suffering a seizure, he was
diagnosed as insane and taken to McLean Asylum, a part of
Massachusetts General Hospital. He spent 7 years at McLean, dying there in 1880.
And the winner is…?
William Morton has won the vote of most modern medical historians
and anesthesiologists, who believe that the historical evidence is
overwhelmingly in his favor. According
to the Boston History Collaborative, although Morton certainly built
on the work of others and leaned on the advice of Jackson, it was
his “bold demonstration [that] opened the floodgates for surgical
procedures that provided the groundwork for new lifesaving
surgeries.”
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Charles Jackson’s supporters, led by his sister Lidian Jackson
Emerson, never gave up the fight on his behalf.
Jackson’s niece Edith Emerson Forbes may be responsible for
the wording of the plaque that can be found today in Plymouth’s
Brewster Garden |
| Dedicated to the memory of Lidian Emerson, wife
of Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, daughter of Charles and Lucy
Cotton Jackson of Plymouth, and of her brother Charles Thomas
Jackson, M.D., discoverer of the safe method of using ether for
anaesthesia in surgery. |
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| William
T. Davis, in his Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian, characterizes his fellow
Plymouthean gently |
| He
[Jackson] knew too much, and too many things for him to
develop, and by his own labors to apply to practical use.
His mind was like a garden so crowded with vegetation
of his own planting that none or few reached perfect bloom
and seed. But
the passerby attracted by one or another, though ignorant of
botany, would pluck a slip or a root, and setting it in his
own grounds, by unremitting care nurse it into vigorous
growth and a perfected life.
Without the garden which the gardener had planted,
the passerby would never have found the plant, and without
the act of the passerby the plant would have died and the
labors of the gardener would have been in vain. |
The
Ether Monument, unveiled in Boston's Public Garden in 1868, gives no
credit at all. The granite statue atop the 40-foot obelisk is
a representation of the Good Samaritan comforting the afflicted.
Sources
:
Sources held in Pilgrim Hall Museum’s Library include Charles T.
Jackson’s First report on
the geology of Maine (Augusta, Me. : The State, 1837), Martin
Gay’s A statement of the claims of Charles T. Jackson, M.D. to the discovery
of the applicability of sulphuric ether to the prevention of pain in
surgical operations (Boston, 1847),
William T. Morton’s Report
to the House of Representatives on sulphuric ether (Washington,
DC : The Congress, 1852), Edward Waldo Emerson’s A
history of the gift of painless surgery (Boston : Houghton,
Mifflin and Co. , 1896), and Delores Bird Carpenter’s The
selected letters of Lidian Jackson Emerson (Columbia, Mo. :
University of Missouri Press, 1987). The contemporary arguments on
behalf of both Morton and Jackson - along with a flavor of the
intense controversy the issue generated in the 1840’s - can found
found in the pages of Littell’s
Living Age Magazine, online at Cornell University’s Making of
America Website (cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa), which makes available
the text of over 100,000 19th century journal articles.
Other sources used include the Internet sites of the Harvard
Medical School Department of Anesthesia (www.hmcnet.harvard.edu),
the UCLA School of Dentistry (www.dent.ucla.edu), the Alabama State
Society of Anesthesiologists (www.assa.md) and New Brunswick
(Canada) Community College (www.saintjohn.nbcc.nb.ca).
For a wonderful modern retelling of the story of Morton, Jackson et
al, read Ether day : the strange tale of
America’s greatest medical discovery by Julie M. Fenster
(HarperCollins Publishers, c2001)
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