Ether Dome: Anesthetics, Consciousness & The Hardest Physics Problem of Them All

Just a museum today, The Ether Dome was a surgical operating theater at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It served as the hospital's main operating room from its opening in 1821 until 1867 but also as a kind of entertainment attraction for physicians and scholars to observe the early development of surgery.

It was the site of the first public demonstration of the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic on October 16, 1846, otherwise known as Ether Day.

Medicine, especially surgery would never be the same after this milestone and it would even have implications for philosophy and physics more than a hundred years later.