William Thomas Green Morton came to medicine sideways, through the trade of dentistry, and to fame through a single autumn morning he would spend the rest of his life defending. Through the autumn of 1846 he experimented relentlessly with the vapour of sulphuric ether.
On the sixteenth of October he carried his glass inhaler into the surgical theatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital and changed the practice of surgery in the space of one operation. The triumph curdled into a ruinous contest over patent and priority, and he died in poverty at forty-nine.