The Warren Library
Following the first public operation with ether anesthesia on October 16, 1846, Dr. John Collins Warren began to assemble data from over 200 surgical cases to promote the discovery, hoping to change “the slow progress of the practice of etherization in this country beyond the vicinity of its first introduction, compared with its rapid extension on the other side of the Atlantic.”
This copy of Etherization was presented by John Collins Warren to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), then a member of the faculty of Harvard College. Longfellow said, “I rejoice that such a calm, dispassionate and firm approval of the great discovery should appear from your pen to cheer the timid, and convince the skeptical. The words you have spoken will have great weight for you speak with authority, and have an indisputable right to speak.” Longfellow, too, had a right to speak as, just a year earlier, his wife, Fanny, became the first woman in the United States to undergo childbirth with anesthesia.
The first book to be published on medical education in America was written by Dr. John Morgan, who founded the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, the nation’s first medical school, in 1765.
This particular copy is notable for its fly-leaf presentation inscription from Morgan himself to Dr. John Warren (1753-1815) in 1783. In the previous autumn, Warren was appointed Harvard’s professor of anatomy and surgery and charged by the Corporation of Harvard College to devise a plan for medical instruction. John Warren delivered his first course of lectures during the winter of 1783-1784. This was the beginning of Harvard Medical School.