NO REAL WINNER, NO HAPPY ENDINGS,
AND A MONUMENT TO NO ONE
The ether controversy took a massive toll on three of the four contenders mentioned earlier.
Horace Wells left his profession, abandoned his family, became addicted to chloroform, went insane under its influence, and committed suicide.
Charles Thomas Jackson eventually suffered a mental breakdown, or possibly a stroke, and was admitted to the McLean Asylum in 1873. He died there on August 28, 1880.
William T.G. Morton abandoned dentistry for farming and became impoverished from years of ether-related litigation. On July 15, 1868 he was riding in a carriage with his wife in New York City. He suddenly demanded the carriage to stop, and he ran into the lake in Central Park “to cool off”. This peculiar behavior was because he had suffered a major stroke (cerebrovascular accident) which proved fatal soon after. The official death record lists the cause of his death as “sunstroke”.
Erected in 1867, The Ether Monument, also known as The Good Samaritan, is a statue and fountain in Boston’s Public Garden. The statue depicts a medical doctor in medieval Moorish-Spanish robe and turban—representing a Good Samaritan—who holds the drooping body of an almost naked man on his left knee. The doctor holds in his left hand a cloth, suggesting the use of ether that would be developed in centuries to come.
There are no names on the monument – just Biblical quotations – and it has been nicknamed “The Either Monument”.