On December 27, 1845, in the small town of Jefferson, Georgia, a quiet medical experiment unfolded that would permanently alter the experience of human suffering. On that day, Dr. Crawford Long administered ether anesthesia during childbirth for the first time, extending a technique he had already used in surgery to one of the most painful and perilous moments in human life. The event attracted little immediate attention, yet it marked a turning point in medical history—one that would eventually reshape surgery, obstetrics, and society’s understanding of pain itself.
Ether was not a new substance in 1845. Chemists had long understood its properties, and recreational “ether frolics” were popular in parts of the United States, where participants inhaled the vapor to experience brief euphoria and insensibility. What distinguished Long was not discovery but application. A country doctor educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Long had carefully observed that individuals under the influence of ether could injure themselves without apparent pain. On March 30, 1842—nearly four years earlier—he had already used ether to painlessly remove a tumor from a patient’s neck, making him, by most historical accounts, the first physician to perform surgery under general anesthesia.
The December 27, 1845 childbirth extended this insight into obstetrics, a field where pain was often regarded as unavoidable—or even divinely ordained. Childbirth in the mid-19th century was a dangerous ordeal, with high maternal mortality and few effective interventions. Labor pain was considered an immutable fact of nature, reinforced by religious interpretations of Genesis that framed suffering in childbirth as punishment. Long’s decision to use ether during delivery quietly challenged those assumptions, suggesting that pain relief was not only possible but medically appropriate.
Unlike later figures who would popularize anesthesia in large urban hospitals, Long practiced in a rural Southern community. His work lacked the institutional megaphone of Boston or London, and he was cautious by temperament. Rather than rushing to publish his findings, Long focused on his patients and continued refining his methods. This caution would prove costly to his historical recognition. In 1846—less than a year after the Jefferson childbirth—dentist William T. G. Morton publicly demonstrated ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, an event that electrified the medical world and rapidly spread anesthesia across Europe and North America.
Only later did Long publish his earlier work, in 1849, asserting his priority in the use of ether. By then, credit for anesthesia’s “discovery” had become bitterly contested among Morton, Horace Wells, Charles Jackson, and others. Long, lacking powerful institutional allies and disinclined to self-promotion, never received the acclaim many historians believe he deserved during his lifetime.
Yet the significance of the 1845 childbirth remains profound. It marked one of the earliest steps toward humane obstetrics and foreshadowed broader debates that would follow. When Queen Victoria accepted chloroform during the birth of Prince Leopold in 1853, religious objections to pain relief in childbirth rapidly softened. What Long had done quietly in Georgia would soon be echoed in royal courts and major hospitals, helping normalize the idea that medicine’s role was not merely to observe suffering, but to relieve it.
The broader implications of ether anesthesia were revolutionary. Surgery, once a race against the patient’s screams and shock, became a controlled scientific endeavor. Obstetrics moved toward safer, more compassionate practices. The very concept of pain as an unavoidable element of medical treatment began to erode, replaced by the expectation that physicians should actively mitigate suffering whenever possible.
