Before the middle of the 1800s, surgery was something patients endured fully awake. Operations had to be fast, and many people avoided them until it was too late. On October 16, 1846, in a domed amphitheater at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, that began to change. The day is still remembered as Ether Day.

Surgery Before Anesthesia

Early nineteenth-century surgeons were valued for speed. Amputations were measured in minutes, and patients were often held down by assistants. Alcohol and opium offered limited relief. Pain was so severe that it shaped every decision about whether and how to operate, and many procedures that are routine today were simply not attempted.

Scientists and physicians had known for some time that certain gases, including nitrous oxide and diethyl ether, could cause people to lose sensation or consciousness. Some had used them at parties for amusement. A few practitioners had experimented with them in dental or minor procedures. What was missing was a convincing public demonstration in a major hospital.

The Demonstration

William T. G. Morton, a Boston dentist, had been experimenting with ether and arranged to demonstrate it at Massachusetts General Hospital. On the morning of October 16, 1846, in the hospital’s surgical amphitheater, Morton administered ether to a patient named Edward Gilbert Abbott. The surgeon John Collins Warren then removed a tumor from Abbott’s neck.

Accounts of the day report that the patient did not show the usual signs of agony, and that he afterward reported feeling little or no pain. Skeptics had watched earlier attempts fail, so the result drew intense interest. The event was widely publicized, and news spread quickly to Europe.

Who Deserves Credit

The demonstration was followed by a long and bitter dispute over who deserved credit for discovering surgical anesthesia. Claimants included:

• Morton, who performed the public demonstration.
• Charles T. Jackson, a chemist and physician who had advised Morton on ether.
• Horace Wells, a Hartford dentist who had earlier tried to demonstrate nitrous oxide in Boston without success.
• Crawford Long, a Georgia physician who had used ether in surgery in the early 1840s but had not published promptly.

The quarrel consumed years of their lives and was never fully resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. Boston physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. is credited with suggesting the word anesthesia to describe the new state.

The Ether Dome Today

The amphitheater where the demonstration took place, inside the hospital’s Bulfinch Building, became known as the Ether Dome. Designed by Charles Bulfinch and completed in the early 1820s, the building is a National Historic Landmark. The room remains in use for lectures and meetings, and the hospital has historically allowed visitors when it is not in use. Visiting policies can change, so check with Massachusetts General Hospital before planning a trip.

A Lasting Legacy

Modern anesthesia is a sophisticated medical specialty that bears little resemblance to a glass inhaler of ether. But the demonstration in Boston marked a turning point. It made longer, more careful surgery possible and spared countless patients unimaginable pain. Few events in the city’s history have had such a direct effect on ordinary lives around the world.

Each October, Salem fills with costumes, haunted houses and visitors from around the world. The city has embraced its nickname, Witch City. But the history at its core is not a ghost story. In 1692, a wave of accusations, fear and flawed justice led to the deaths of more than two dozen people in colonial Massachusetts. Understanding what happened makes a visit more meaningful.

How It Began

In early 1692, in Salem Village, a farming community that is now the town of Danvers, several girls began having fits that adults could not explain. Local ministers and physicians suggested witchcraft. Under pressure, the girls named individuals they said were afflicting them. The first accused included Tituba, an enslaved woman in the household of the village minister, Samuel Parris, along with two other women on the margins of the community.

Accusations spread quickly beyond the village to Salem Town, Andover and other communities. Within months, well over a hundred people had been accused and jailed.

The Court and Its Evidence

The Massachusetts colony was in a period of political uncertainty, waiting on a new charter. When the new governor, William Phips, arrived, he established a special Court of Oyer and Terminer to hear the cases. The court accepted spectral evidence, testimony that a defendant’s spirit had appeared to and harmed the accuser. Such evidence was impossible to disprove.

Between June and September 1692, nineteen people were hanged. Giles Corey, an elderly man who refused to enter a plea, was pressed to death under heavy stones. Several others died in jail. Those accused who confessed were generally spared execution, a cruel incentive that rewarded false confessions.

Why It Happened

Historians have offered many explanations, and most agree several pressures were at work:

• Fear and trauma from frontier wars with Indigenous nations and French forces in Maine and New Hampshire.
• Bitter local disputes over land, church leadership and village independence.
• A legal system that allowed unreliable evidence and gave the accused little defense.
• A religious worldview in which the devil was understood as a real, active threat.

The End and the Apology

By the fall of 1692, prominent ministers, including Increase Mather, were raising doubts about spectral evidence. Phips dissolved the special court, and later trials largely ended in acquittals. In the years that followed, a judge, Samuel Sewall, publicly acknowledged his guilt, and the colony eventually reversed many convictions and paid some compensation to families. Massachusetts formally cleared the remaining names much later, including through legislation in 1957 and 2001, and a final exoneration came in 2022.

Visiting Thoughtfully

Salem offers both lighthearted Halloween fun and serious history. The Salem Witch Trials Memorial, near the Charter Street Cemetery, honors those who died with simple stone benches. The Salem Maritime National Historical Park, managed by the National Park Service, covers the city’s broader history; see nps.gov for details. October weekends are extremely crowded, so consider a weekday visit or arriving by commuter rail or ferry, and check the city’s official visitor information for parking and event guidance.

The lesson of 1692 is not about witches. It is about how fear, rumor and a broken legal process can harm innocent people, a warning that has stayed relevant for more than three centuries.

For people who moved to Boston after 2007, it can be hard to picture the city with a six-lane elevated highway running through the middle of downtown. Yet for nearly half a century, the Central Artery did exactly that, cutting the North End and waterfront off from the rest of the city. The project that replaced it, officially the Central Artery/Tunnel Project and universally known as the Big Dig, was one of the largest and most complicated highway projects in American history.

The Problem Overhead

The elevated Central Artery opened in the 1950s. It was designed to move traffic through the heart of the city, but it quickly became one of the most congested roads in the country. It cast shadows over the streets below, carved neighborhoods apart and left a dark, noisy corridor under its steel frame.

Planners had long talked about putting the highway underground. In the 1970s and 1980s, a plan took shape to replace the artery with a tunnel beneath the city and to build a new connection to Logan Airport under Boston Harbor.

Building Under a Living City

Construction ran from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. What made the project so difficult was that the old highway had to keep carrying traffic while the new one was built beneath it, through soft fill, old foundations and a dense web of utilities. Engineers used techniques such as slurry walls and ground freezing to dig safely next to buildings and subway lines.

Major pieces of the project included:

• The Ted Williams Tunnel under the harbor, connecting the Massachusetts Turnpike toward Logan Airport.
• An underground replacement for the Central Artery, carrying Interstate 93 beneath downtown.
• The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge over the Charles River, a cable-stayed bridge that has become a city landmark.
• An extension of the Massachusetts Turnpike to the airport.

Costs and Controversies

The Big Dig became known nationally for its cost, which grew to many times the early estimates, ultimately exceeding $14 billion in construction costs, with financing adding substantially more over time. It also faced leaks, construction problems and investigations. In 2006, a section of ceiling panels in a connector tunnel collapsed onto a car, killing a passenger, which led to inspections, legal action and lasting scrutiny of the project’s management and contractors.

Those failures are an essential part of the story and remain a case study in engineering and public oversight.

What the City Gained

When the old elevated highway came down, it left a long strip of open land through downtown. That space became the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a chain of parks, gardens, fountains and public spaces stretching from Chinatown to the North End. The Greenway reconnected neighborhoods and the waterfront in ways that had not been possible for decades.

The project also produced a great deal of excavated material, some of which was used to cap landfills and help transform Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor into a public park.

A Mixed but Lasting Legacy

Bostonians still argue about the Big Dig. It cost far more than planned, took longer than promised and did not end traffic congestion. It also transformed the look and feel of downtown, gave the city new parks and changed how people move between neighborhoods and the airport. A walk along the Greenway on an October afternoon is a good way to judge it for yourself.