Experiences relatives aux effets de l'inhalation de l'ether sulfurique sur le systême nerveux. (Mémoire lu à l'Académie Royale de Medicine)

The first scientific analysis of the effects of ether anesthesis. Though ether anesthesia was invented in America, its inventors and early users were either scientifically untrained like Morton, or men of practical scientific or medical skills like Jackson, Warren and Bigelow. Thus, the first scientific studies of how ether anesthesia actually worked took place in France where anesthesia attracted the attention of the neurophysiologist, Longet, and his colleague, Pierre Flourens. At the time many scientists believed that ether anesthesia's effects on the nerves were analogous to those of asphyxia. While Flourens correctly distinguished between the two states, Longet, in a series of animal experiments, determined that "death from overdosage [of ether] appeared to be due to a kind of asphyxia undoubtedly connected with the etherization of the medulla oblongata (bulbe) itself" (Duncum pp. 160-61).