"WANTED: A man with a toothache! WANTED: A man with a tooth to pull!" read the advertisement in the Boston Advertiser. 

On the evening of September 30th, 1846, in his office at 19 Tremont Row, Boston, William Thomas Green Morton, puller of teeth, waited for a patient. 

For a special reason, this time — to test a liquid in a small bottle standing on a shelf. William Morton had inhaled its fumes and had been put to sleep, risking the certain death all medical books said should follow. He had given it to the his father's dog, Nig; he had given it to the hens in the in the backyard.

Now he waited for a human subject. "I will yet banish pain from the world," he had assured his wife.

But who was he to make such claims? A commercial dentist with only three months' dental school experience! A farmer's son who was studying medicine at night. An obscure, part-time medical student at Harvard, he dared to pit himself against the great medical authorities of his time.

For two years he had been experimenting. Now he waited in his lamp-lit office, waited tensely for someone bold enough to try the new substance — ether. 

The first patient to mount the stairs on that fateful evening was Eben Frost, a portly gentlemen of Boston. His head was wrapped in a scarf. His toothache was violent.

He took ether, and slept.

His tooth was pulled. He did not feel it. Upon awakening, he sprang from the chair crying, "Glory, Hallelujah!" and praised God for a miracle!

Then, on October 16th, 1846, in the amphitheater of the Massachusetts General Hospital, before an assemblage of skeptical doctors, William Thomas Green Morton gave the new fumes to a patient. An operation was performed. The surgeon was Morton's teacher of anatomy, Dr. John Collins Warren, of Harvard. 

"Gentlemen!" cried the professor, "this is no humbug!"

The agony of the operating room was over. The hacksaw era in surgery had ended. 

And then the world heaped opprobrium on the discoverer. Other claimants rose to question his honor. He was insulted, robbed of his profits, hung in effigy in his home town.

Almost a century later, a grateful medical world elected Dr. William Thomas Green Morton to the Hall of Fame. He goes down in history, with Pasteur and Jenner and Harvey, as one of the greatest contributors to medical advancement. His fame, questioned in his lifetime, is enhanced after his passing.

Dr. Morton died in Central Park in New York City, from an attack of apoplexy brought on by his grief because of a scurrilous article questioning his rights as the discoverer of ether. At his death he left an estate of "twenty-five dollars, one horse, and some personal belongings." The "personal belongings" were the Order of Vasa from Norway and Sweden, the Cross of St. Vladimir from Russia, and the Medal de Montyou from the French Academy. 

From the dust jacket