ETHER DAY

Copyright 2001 Julie M. Fenster.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction of this 
text is authorized.

The Laughing Gas Joke

In 1845, the New York Daily Tribune published a detailed account of an amputation. The operation took place at the New York Hospital, a five-acre nest of low brick buildings, located on what is now Lower Broadway. The patient was a young man, cradled tenderly the whole time by his father and at the same time held firmly -- and brusquely -- in place by the attendants. As the surgeons -- there were two -- made their cuts, the boy's screams were so full of misery that everyone who could left the room. The first part of the operation complete, the young man watched “with glazed agony” as the chief surgeon pushed a saw past the sliced muscles, still twitching, and listened as the blade cut through the bone in three heavy passes, back and forth. That was the only noise in the room, for the boy had stopped screaming.
A scant four blocks up the street at the cavernous Broadway Tabernacle theater, close to four thousand people were howling with laughter at the antics of people who had inhaled nitrous oxide gas in the “Grand Exhibition” staged for just that purpose.  
The audience’s volunteer was the fellow who set upon the master of ceremonies, Gardner Q. Colton, with his fists. He had to be dragged off by the “twelve stout men engaged,” as the playbill explained, “to prevent those who take the Gas, while under its influence, from injuring themselves or others.” Under the influence of nitrous oxide, volunteers were known to be insensible to pain, doing things that hurt only after they came to. 
The critic for the high-brow New Mirror, writing a column called “Diary of Town Trifles,” especially liked the “young man who coolly undertook a promenade over the close-packed heads of the audience.”
“The impertinence of the idea seemed to me in the highest degree brilliant and delightful,” applauded the critic, who then described other onstage escapades under the influence of laughing gas: “One silly youth went to and fro, smirking and bowing, another did a scene of `Richard the Third,' and a tall, good-looking man laughed heartily, and suddenly stopped and demanded of the audience, in indignant rage, what they were laughing at!”
They were laughing at everything. As far as the audience was concerned, that was the whole idea of the “Grand Exhibition of the Effect Produced by inhaling Nitrous Oxide or EXHILARATING or LAUGHING GAS!” A few of those present at the Tabernacle temporarily lost their senses from inhaling the gas, but the hundreds in the audience lost their senses from laughing at the antics onstage. Some people walked across heads, and some people had their heads walked on. 
“This is in truth a scientific entertainment, although we have our doubts whether the use of it will serve to advance the cause of science,” stated the Tribune's report on the nitrous oxide demonstration. But the Tribune was off; off by a scant four blocks in some uptown version of glazed agony. Any one of four thousand people at the Broadway Tabernacle on that day in 1845 could have made the discovery that nitrous oxide was, on the contrary, at the core of the very greatest advance that “the cause of science” could receive. A couple of whiffs would have helped separate that boy at New York Hospital from the pain of surgery.
His operation was like any other between the beginning of time and Ether Day, or more pointedly, between the middle of 1800 and October 16, 1846, an era when help that was desperately required in hospitals was dismissed as a joke called Laughing Gas. During the same years, nitrous oxide was joined in the world of young fun by ether, a chemical with similar powers. Each one could make people insensible long enough for an operation, but ether was the stronger of the two.  The laughing gas joke did not begin with the discovery of these substances. It began in 1800, when Humphrey Davy of England stated in a well-received book that, “As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations.” 
No one took his suggestion. That was the laughing gas joke. For almost fifty years, all over America and all over the world, the art of surgery was stranded upon the screaming of its patients. In an operating room in New York, a young boy fell silent from the horror and in some other place, the brilliant Humphrey Davy was duly knighted by the crown and idolized by commoners, but meanwhile, the wisest thing he ever said was ignored, amid all the laughter that followed nitrous oxide and ether around.