John H. Packard's primary ether anesthesia.

ETHER has long been known to cause a short period of analgesia before inducing unconsciousness and surgical anesthesia. In 1794, Thomas Beddoes had already provided relief with a short inhalation of ether for a young woman suffering from a painful mastitis John Snow also alluded to that initial analgesic stage in his 1847 book on ether. Deep anesthesia was rarely sought or reached in the early days of ether, and many operations were done in the agent’s initial stage. The first two patients anesthetized by Morton at the Massachusetts General Hospital and several of Long’s patients in Georgia inhaled ether for 3 or 4 min only, moved and groaned during their surgery, and remembered feeling the incision although they denied experiencing any pain. During the first operation done under ether at the Pennsylvania University Hospital (a leg amputation) the anesthetist, Dr. James Darrach, inadvertently rendered his patient unconscious, which prompted the surgeon, Dr. George W. Norris, to yell at him “take that damned thing away, Darrach!” The systematic use of ether’s early analgesic stage became popular in Germany after P. Sudeck in 1901 introduced a procedure that he called “Aetherrausch.” Sudeck is generally considered to be the inventor of ether analgesia. However, in 1872, 29 yr before Sudeck, John H. Packard of Philadelphia had reported an almost identical technique. Packard called his method “first insensibility to ether” or “primary anesthesia.”