ncluding surgeons, perceived surgery. Although surgical anesthesia was not discovered until the middle of the nineteenth century, there were significant contributions by talented thinkers made more than one hundred years before the discovery.4 The list of those contributors includes Joseph Priestley, who discovered hydrogen in 1766, nitrogen in 1772, and oxygen and nitrous oxide in 1774 and also introduced inhalation as a way to administer medicine5, Humphrey Davy, who proved nitrous oxide was not poisonous6, and Henry Hill Hickman, who made the first successful experiments with nitrous oxide on lower animals7.
             After these advances in the early nineteenth century, the most popular experiment at scientific exhibits was for the students to become intoxicated by inhaling ether or nitrous oxide, commonly called laughing gas, in the United States. Such experiments became so popular that students entertained themselves outside of class by holding ether parties. These parties, frequently called "ether frolics," were common all over the country. It was the ether frolics that eventually led to the realization that ether can cause unconsciousness and, with that, relief of pain.8
             In the small village of Jefferson, Georgia, an ether frolic was scheduled in early 1841. This event attracted the attention of Crawford Williamson Long, a young doctor living in a nearby town, who later held ether frolics in his own home as a form of entertainment. Long afterward noted that although guests at his ether parties were terribly bruised from hitting objects while unconscious, they were frequently not felt or seen until several days later. Long decided that being intoxicated with ether might produce the same degree of insensibility during a surgical operation.9
             Meanwhile, James Venable, one of Long's friends who had participated in the ether frolics, wanted Long to remove two tumors on the side of his neck. Venable was fearful of surger...