Field Notes from Fifty-Five Fruit Street: The Ether Dome

by Dr. Amy Rothenberg | Aug 16, 2023 | Articles

The day we check in, staff is running late. We go exploring down Charles Street and around the neighborhood, come back to MGH and run into a construction worker looking out a picture frame window at excavating being done between buildings. I ask him for a verbal tour of all the hospital buildings we were looking at. He ends with the stately original structure, topped by the Ether Dome and small museum. Paul’s ears perk up at the word MUSEUM, as there has not a been a museum in this wide world that he is not interested in exploring (just ask our kids!)

In the old days surgeries were “performed” if you will, before live audiences, in small amphitheaters. Apparently, it was a sellout crowd in October, 1846 when Dentist William T.G. Morton proffered ether to patient Edward G. Abbott, and surgeon John Collins Warren, MD, removed a tumor from the jaw of Mr. Abbott who did not flinch or yell out and awoke to report he felt and recalled nothing. Thus ushered in the era of anesthesia, a monumental miracle in medicine, where most of us by a certain age have had some procedure for diagnostic or treatment purposes, or routine dental care done with little to no pain. The Ether Dome is a tribute to this inaugural event.

It is not lost on me today, as I have my first spinal tap to both remove samples of spinal fluid to look for trouble maker cells and to administer chemotherapy through to the area, in case any such cells are trying…