anesthesia

How William Morton's 1846 ether demonstration at Mass General transformed surgery from conscious agony into painless procedure — and why we still don't fully understand it.

We've used general anesthesia since 1846 and perform 300 million surgeries a year with it — but we still don't know exactly how it works.

Before 1846, surgery meant unbearable agony and a near-certain chance of fatal infection. Here's how medicine solved both problems within a generation.