The Operating Room Where Surgery First Went Painless in Public

At the top of the Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital is a round, skylit amphitheater with steep tiers of seats. It was the hospital's operating room from 1821 until the late 1860s, and on October 16, 1846, it was the scene of the first public demonstration of surgery under ether. A dentist, William T. G. Morton, had the patient, Edward Gilbert Abbott, breathe sulfuric ether vapor. The surgeon John Collins Warren then removed a tumor from Abbott's neck while the room of doctors and students watched a man lie still under the knife. When it was over, Warren is reported to have said, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." The room has been called the Ether Dome ever since. It is still used for lectures and teaching, and it now also holds an Egyptian mummy named Padihershef, a plaster Apollo and a mural recreating the scene of that morning in 1846.