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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., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2022 International Anesthesia Research Society.)

Letheon was the commercial name that Boston dentist William T. G. Morton chose for his ether-based "preparation" that was inhaled to produce insensibility during surgical and dental procedures. The multiple editions of Edward Warren's Some Account of the Letheon (1847) as well as Nathan P. Rice's Trials of a Public Benefactor (1859) provide the only known accounts of the meeting hosted by the physician Augustus A. Gould at which the name Letheon was chosen. Neither Warren nor Rice mentions when the meeting occurred. In all likelihood, it was held at some point in a three-week period from mid-November to just short of December 9, 1846, the publication date of the earliest known reference to the name. The absence of the word Letheon in Morton's public notices around the end of November 1846 or, indeed, in any document until his December 9 advertisement in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal suggests a later date for the meeting than has been previously reported., (Copyright © 2020 Anesthesia History Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The proclamation, "Gentlemen! this is no humbug," attributed to John Collins Warren, M.D., was not identified in any contemporaneous eyewitness report of William T. G. Morton's October 16, 1846, demonstration of ether at Massachusetts General Hospital. The earliest known documentation of the proclamation is in Nathan P. Rice's biography of Morton, first published in 1859. Only three eyewitnesses, Washington Ayer, M.D., Robert Thompson Davis, M.D., and Isaac Francis Galloupe, M.D., reported Warren's alleged proclamation. However, their accounts first appeared in 1896, 50 yr after Morton's demonstration of etherization. Although Warren's alleged proclamation appears plausible, the overall impression from eyewitness statements and publications relating to the October 16, 1846, demonstration of etherization is that it may not have been made.

The Morton ether inhaler in the possession of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, was traced back to 1906 when the earliest known photograph of it was published. The authors believe that the inhaler was given by William T. G. Morton, MD, to J. Mason Warren, MD, in January 1847. The inhaler was acquired by the Warren Anatomical Museum at an unknown date, loaned to Massachusetts General Hospital in October 1946, and placed on permanent loan to Massachusetts General Hospital in April 1948. Many documents relating to the inhaler have disappeared, and it was only identified in 2009 as the inhaler that probably belonged to J. Mason Warren, MD. The inhaler is not believed to be the one that Morton used on October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital. It is the only known example of a Morton ether inhaler with valves (excluding replicas or reproduction inhalers) and is probably of similar design to the inhaler that Morton used on October 16, 1846.