William T. G. Morton's English Patent for Etherization: Patently Pointless?

Boston dentist William T. G. Morton secured a provisional English patent for etherization in December 1846. The full patent specification was submitted 6 months later, and the patent was sealed on June 18, 1847. The enrolled copies of the provisional and full patents, which are held in The National Archives, London, have not been previously documented in the anesthesia literature. We review the communications between Boston and London regarding the patent for etherization, the possibility that preliminary discussions and trials of etherization may have been conducted in London before the earliest known application of the discovery for a dental extraction on December 19, 1846, and the role of the American lawyer James Augustus Dorr, who was Morton's agent in the United Kingdom.

Wood's and Guedel's Legacies Return to the Heartland.

Pioneering anesthesiologists Paul Wood, M.D., and Arthur Guedel, M.D., were Hoosiers who migrated from America's Heartland to opposite coasts. Dr. Wood moved east to New York in 1913; Dr. Guedel, west to California in 1928. By 1962, each pioneer had been honored with a namesake anesthesia museum. Fast-forwarding 55 yr, two young anesthesia historians, California's Jane Moon, M.D., and Pennsylvania's Melissa Coleman, M.D., met at the 2017 International Symposium of the History of Anesthesia in Boston. Today, these women are chairs of the Wood Library-Museum's Archives and Museum Committees, respectively. As the newest authors of "Anesthesiology Reflections," Drs. Coleman and Moon leave their coastal states semiannually for board meetings at the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, returning as legacies of Drs. Wood and Guedel…back to the American Heartland.

Etymology of Letheon: Nineteenth-century Linguistic Effervescence.

In late 1846, following his successful public demonstrations of surgical anesthesia, Boston dentist William T. G. Morton selected Letheon as the commercial name for the ether-based "preparation" he had used to produce insensibility to pain. We have not identified a first-hand account of the coinage of Letheon. Although the name ultimately derives from the Greek Lethe, the adjective Lethean, much in use in the mid-19th century, may have influenced Morton and those he called on to assist in finding a commercial name. By one unverified account, the name Letheon might have been coined independently by both Augustus Addison Gould, M.D., and Henry Jacob Bigelow, M.D.

Advertising in Heroic Couplets: Laughing Gas by Dentist W.J.A. DeLancey.

Dr. William J.A. DeLancey moved to Illinois from New England in 1858 to practice dentistry. Renowned for his good humor and amiable personality, DeLancey penned a seven-stanza poem in heroic couplets titled "Dental Surgery." These mock-heroic verses were published in about half of the Centralia Sentinel weekly newspapers issued in 1864. Inventor of a tooth powder and an electric dental motor, DeLancey became a statewide leader of Freemasonry. Unfortunately, both his vocational dental library and his avocational Masonic one were incinerated by a house fire in 1892. As a lifelong professional dentist, DeLancey was widely regarded as a true pillar of the communities and of the Masonic Temples in which he had served--first in Illinois (Galesburg and then Centralia) and finally in Williamsport, Indiana.

Correspondence by Charles T. Jackson containing the earliest known illustrations of a Morton ether inhaler.

A letter, dated December 1, 1846, from Charles T. Jackson, MD, to Josiah D. Whitney contains a previously unreported description of a Morton ether inhaler and the only known contemporaneous hand-drawn illustrations of this type of ether inhaler. This letter and 2 other known letters on ether anesthesia were probably carried from Boston, MA, to Liverpool, United Kingdom, on the same paddle steamer (Acadia) that carried the well-known letter from Jacob Bigelow, MD, to Francis Boott, MD.

Special Article: Howard Dittrick: curator to the McMechans' legacy journal.

A noted medical historian and museum curator, Canadian American Howard Dittrick was a Cleveland gynecologist who served as Directing Editor of Current Researches in Anesthesia and Analgesia (1940-1954). In the aftermath of World War II, even after Congresses of Anesthetists had resumed, Dittrick and his editorial board allowed their yellow, then tan-covered journal, the so-called "yellow peril," to languish into near irrelevance.