Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital was founded in 1811 in Boston, proposed by the Reverend John Bartlett, Chaplain of the Almshouse, and established through the efforts of the Harvard surgeon John Collins Warren and the physician James Jackson, with a building designed by the architect Charles Bulfinch. It was created to serve the poor, since wealthier patients of the era were treated at home. Its operating theater, the Ether Dome, hosted a pivotal moment in medical history on 16 October 1846, when the dentist William Morton administered inhaled ether to a patient so that Warren could painlessly remove a tumor from the man's neck; the procedure passed without screaming or restraint, and the skeptical Warren reportedly remarked, Gentlemen, this is no humbug. News of the anesthesia demonstration spread around the world within months.