I first read Julie Fenster's Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It in 2002, and the book has remained with me since. Writing a history book in narrative non-fiction format is no easy task, and few authors make it work. Fenster not only succeeds, but excels with this format, making the history of medicine behind the discovery of ether as a form of anesthesia as interesting as a modern-day fiction thriller.
Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It
Readers need a strong stomach to handle parts of Fenster's book, as the subject deals largely with 18th and 19th-century surgical techniques and the use of virtually no pain killers for patients. Her descriptions, from medical records, diaries, and letters, are chilling. Amputations of gangrenous limbs done without anesthesia (and often requiring a team of student surgeons to hold down the horrified patient in a macabre orientation to the operating room) abound in her history. As Fenster notes, "Surgical science was a critical part of humanity's progress, but it was bound fast to an even deeper part of the human lot – the inescapable fact of pain." (23)
She continues her description of early 19th-century surgeries in hospitals: "On the day of an operation, a patient was led up to the top floor in any hospital with a dome or a tower.... Towers offered the best light, but that is not why they housed the operating rooms in modern hospitals of the early 1800s: They isolated the sound of screaming." (24)
Opium, alcohol, and mesmerism or hypnotism were the main forms of anesthesia for operations until 1846, when William T.G. Morton, a 27-year-old dentist, was offered the opportunity to demonstrate the use of sulfuric ether on a surgery patient at Mass General Hospital in Boston, Mass. This is Fenster's cruelest chapter, leaving the reader hanging at the end, then spending the next several chapters providing the backstory behind the event.
The backstory, though, is worth it, discussing rivalries in surgery, the coalescing of modern American medicine and the social and professional changes that shaped it, and competitors in the race to find a pain-free form of surgery.
Her most interesting anecdote is that describing the use of ether for Queen Victoria's eighth child, Prince Leopold, and her request for chloroform. John Snow, a London physician, had been experimenting with chloroform for some time, and Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, had expressed interest when she had her seventh child in 1848. Chloroform was still highly experimental at that time, but by 1853, when she had Leopold, its use was more standardized. The anesthetized childbirth was declared a success by the Queen and the Prince, leading to a clamoring for chloroform among aristocratic women in Europe.
Part of the History of Medicine Classics
Fenster's book, like Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, isn't just a history monograph designed to add to the literature, but a compelling story as well, serving both professional historians and mass audiences alike.
Most graduate students in policy and science history lead off with Paul Starr's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Social Transformation of American Medicine (Basic Books, 1983) as the anchor for understanding social, political and economic forces shaping medicine in the United States. While neither Ether Day nor The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a policy study or policy history, both flesh out the atmosphere of research and patient work, and legal and ethical forces shaping doctors' actions in their respective studied time frames.
Ether Day contains riveting historical details and larger themes that apply to so many divisions of modern medicine, from childbirth to dentistry to surgery. This history of anesthesia is so much more, and one book that historians, students of history and avid lay readers should not miss.
Fenster, Julie. Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It. HarperCollins, 2001. Available in eBook form at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.
Melanie Zoltan - Melanie Zoltan is a former college professor and administrator who has written for About.com, PCWorld, Brain Child, Thomson Gale, and ...
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