The Operation on Alice Mohan
On November 6, Morton approached George Hayward to employ his compound in a hospital amputation. John Collins Warren then received a letter from Morton indicating the substance was sulphuric ether, and on that understanding he approved the use of the anesthetic for the procedure. Hayward’s amputation of a lower leg of Alice Mohan was, on November 7, the first capital operation using ether anesthesia, and, in the assessment of Richard M. Hodges, is “therefore justly regarded as the first decisive operation performed under its influence…. This was the actual demonstration which from its magnitude was calculated to carry to the scientific world the conviction—first, of the certainty of ether; second, of its safety; and third, of the completeness of the insensibility which it produced.”
On December 14, W.T.G. Morton then ceded to Massachusetts General Hospital the right "to use the discovery above mentioned for the benefit of indigent patients, the sick and suffering poor, and other persons at the institution."