Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-09(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Theodore Brown; Alexander Nemerov; Naomi Rogers; John Harley Warner.

The discovery of surgical anesthesia in the 1840s was arguably the most significant development in nineteenth-century Western medicine. It opened new operative horizons for surgeons and transformed patients's experience of pain. It was also contentious, followed by vitriolic arguments by several individuals over competing claims to being the original discoverer. Though historians and medical professionals have long taken an interest in examining these debates, they remain largely unresolved. While previous historical studies have enriched understanding of the early use of chemical anesthetics such as nitrous oxide or sulfuric ether in the nineteenth-century, they have obscured broader historical contexts in America that were integral to theorizing and implementing painless surgical techniques. As this dissertation argues, the 'discovery' of surgical anesthesia was deeply indebted to Mesmerism.

Though relatively unknown today, Mesmerism was both widespread and popular in nineteenth-century America. It was written about in newspapers, medical periodicals, pamphlets, and books; could be found in theaters, opera houses, and proprietary museums; and was a subject of interest for religious and political reformers, artists, physicians, and workaday Americans. By the 1840s, it suffused almost every aspect of American culture. Once considered 'pseudo-science' or medical quackery by scholars, recent methodological and historiographical developments in the history of science have permitted new insight and appreciation of its historical significance. This dissertation assumes that rigorous historical examination of Mesmerism in the nineteenth-century United States yields valuable insight into the underlying cultural, social, and epistemological assumptions that determined what constituted scientific knowledge in the early Republic.

Mesmerism exemplified nineteenth-century American understandings and assumptions about scientific knowledge. In an era before universities and laboratory research, citizens participated in what I term a 'public culture of science,' investigating matters of fact alongside trained naturalists and learned physicians. They avidly read about medical and scientific research in commercial newspapers and magazines; and frequented proprietary museums to take in curious, odd, and novel displays of scientific knowledge. It should come as no surprise that anesthesia was first demonstrated in such spaces. Insofar as museums and theaters tolerated and embraced risk, danger, and uncertainty--qualities fundamentally at odds with the professional values of nineteenth-century medical practitioners--they provided an ideal set of conditions necessary to test a novel, though unproven clinical intervention.

More than any single individual, surgical anesthesia was the fruit of such a public culture of science. Nonetheless, this dissertation also draws attention to a relatively unknown figure, Robert Hanham Collyer, a British-American and his role in the early history of anesthesia. While health professionals and historians of anesthesia are likely familiar with the names William Morton, Horace Wells, and Crawford Long, he remains a relatively obscure actor in studies of the early history of anesthesia.

Collyer was a well-trained physician. He began his medical studies in London, travelled to Paris for clinical experience, and took a degree from the Berkshire Medical College in rural Massachusetts. At the same time, he pursued a successful if not notorious career as a public showman of science. On stage, he exhibited mesmeric phenomena in breathtaking and sensational fashion, extracting teeth or electrocuting mesmerized subjects to prove that it was no hoax. Though clearly entertainment, his exhibitions dramatized recent developments in neuroanatomical and neurophysiological research that challenged traditional medical understandings of the human body. This dissertation provides the first in-depth examination of his exhibition career and published works. They also publicized and powerfully demonstrated that pain could be abolished during surgical operations.

Despite the close historical association of Mesmerism and anesthesia, Americans would come to remember the latter in largely chemical terms. I argue that such selective remembrance of anesthetic discovery performed important cultural work in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century United States. Through an examination of two public monuments--the Ether Monument (1868) in Boston Public Garden and the Crawford Long Memorial (1910) in Jefferson, Georgia--this dissertation reveals how anesthetic memory was haunted by the Civil War; and fashioned to legitimate new institutionalized forms of authority and knowledge that would undermine America's nineteenth-century public culture of science.