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Richard J Wolfe, Tarnished idol William Thomas Green Morton and the introduction of surgical anesthesia. A chronicle of the ether controversy, San Anselmo, CA, Norman Publishing, 2001, pp. xv, 672, illus., US$125.00 (hardback 0-939495-81-1). Orders to: Norman Publishing, PO Box 2566, San Anselmo, CA, 94979-2566, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
This book could be described as the first revisionist history of the early years of general anaesthesia. Standard texts, both academic and popular, tell that the first successful public demonstration of inhalation anaesthesia was by the Boston dentist William T G Morton at the Massachusetts General Hospital in October 1846 and the succeeding events are drawn from two traditional biographical sources, Benjamin Perley Poore's Historical materials for the biography of William T G Morton of 1856, and Nathan P Rice's Trials of a public benefactor of 1858, which was commissioned by Morton himself. In these, Morton was the hero who picked up the baton dropped by Horace Wells, and carried it through to victory. More recent studies, for example the work of Leroy Vandam, questioned the accuracy of the established view, noting that there was no evidence that Morton...