0:00 In the operating theater, the patient's screams were considered part of the procedure.0:06 Before October sixteenth, 1846, surgery was simply torture that you might, just might, survive.0:13 Mm-hm.0:13 The best surgeons weren't the most precise, they were the fastest.0:18 Robert Liston in London could amputate a leg in under thirty seconds.0:23 Because any longer than that, and the patient could die from shock and pain alone.0:29 And that speed is what makes this so wild.0:32 Last week, talking about the race for DNA, we saw how personal ambition and rivalry could speed up a discovery.0:41 But here… the ambition wasn't just for glory.0:44 It was a desperate race against agony itself.0:47 Exactly.0:48 And it starts, um, not with a famous surgeon, but with a dentist from Hartford, Connecticut named Horace Wells.0:56 In 1844, he goes to a "laughing gas" show—a public spectacle where people inhale nitrous oxide and act silly.1:04 Right, it was pure entertainment.1:06 Pure entertainment.1:08 But Wells watches a man inhale the gas, stumble, and gash his leg open, badly.1:14 The man sits down, and as the gas wears off, he looks at his leg, covered in blood, and has no idea what happened.1:22 He felt nothing.1:23 Whoa.1:24 So a lightbulb just goes off over Wells's head.1:27 A massive one.1:28 He thinks, if it can block the pain of a deep gash, it can block the pain of pulling a tooth.1:35 The next day, he has a colleague give him nitrous oxide and pull one of his own molars.1:41 He wakes up and says, "A new era in tooth-pulling!" He was right.1:46 He was also, in ways he couldn't yet understand, completely wrong.1:51 Because he gets his big shot, right?1:54 A demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.1:58 He does.1:59 In early 1845.2:00 He gets a volunteer from the audience, a medical student, to have a tooth pulled.2:06 But something goes wrong.2:07 Maybe he didn't give enough gas, maybe he pulled the tooth too soon… but the patient groans in pain.2:15 Oh no.2:15 And the whole audience of skeptical Boston surgeons just turns on him.2:20 They start hissing and booing.2:23 Someone yells "Humbug!" Wells is humiliated, just laughed out of the room.2:28 His career is basically over.2:30 But someone in that world saw what happened and didn't forget it.2:35 His former business partner.2:37 A handsome, ambitious, and maybe a little ruthless dentist named William Morton.2:43 Morton saw Wells's failure not as an end, but as a near miss.2:47 He became obsessed.2:49 He knew there had to be something that worked better than nitrous oxide.2:54 And this is where the third man in this drama enters the picture.2:59 Dr.2:59 Charles Jackson.3:00 A respected Boston chemist and physician.3:03 Morton goes to him for advice, and Jackson, almost casually, says, "Oh, you should try sulfuric ether." He’d seen it work on a small scale.3:14 So Jackson just gives him the key.3:16 He gives him the key, and Morton runs with it.3:20 He starts experimenting secretly, first on his dog, then on himself.3:25 He gets it to work.3:26 And then he schedules his own demonstration.3:29 Same place as Wells's failure: Massachusetts General Hospital.3:34 October 16, 1846.3:35 You can just feel the tension in that room.3:38 The chief surgeon, John Collins Warren, is ready to remove a tumor from a man's neck.3:44 He looks at the packed theater and says, with total skepticism, "As Dr.3:50 Morton has not arrived, I presume he is otherwise engaged." Right!3:55 He's assuming it's another failure, another no-show.3:58 But then Morton rushes in, he's late because he was making a special inhaler.4:04 He holds this glass globe with a sponge soaked in ether up to the patient's mouth.4:10 The patient breathes it in...4:12 and goes limp.4:13 And everyone is just holding their breath.4:16 Completely silent.4:18 Warren leans in, makes the first cut with his scalpel.4:22 Nothing.4:22 The patient doesn't even flinch.4:25 Warren continues the surgery, removes the entire tumor.4:29 It takes several minutes.4:31 When it’s over, the patient slowly wakes up.4:34 Warren leans over and asks him if he felt anything.4:38 And what does he say?4:39 He says he felt a scratching sensation, but no pain.4:43 And that's when John Collins Warren turns to the stunned audience and delivers one of the most famous lines in medical history: "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." Wow.4:55 That must have been an incredible moment.4:58 The end of surgical pain.5:00 A triumph.5:01 For humanity, yes.5:02 For the men involved?5:03 It was the beginning of the end.5:06 Morton and Jackson immediately began a vicious, public fight over who deserved credit.5:12 Morton had tried to patent ether under a fake name, "Letheon," to make money.5:18 Jackson claimed it was his idea entirely.5:21 And what about Horace Wells?5:23 The man who had the original idea?5:25 It's the most tragic part of the story.5:28 He sees Morton get all the glory for finishing what he started.5:33 He falls into a deep depression, gets arrested for throwing acid on people in New York City, and on January twenty-fourth, 1848, he takes his own life in his jail cell.5:45 Unbelievable.5:46 So none of them got a happy ending.5:49 Not one.5:49 Morton died broke and exhausted at 48, after years of fighting for recognition.5:55 Jackson spent the last seven years of his life in an insane asylum.6:00 The invention that relieved more human suffering than almost any other in history brought nothing but misery to the men who discovered it.6:10 It’s a perfect, and perfectly awful, scientific tragedy.
