On Mar. 30, 1842, Dr. Crawford Long, an American physician and pharmacist in Jefferson, Georgia, used ether for the first time to remove a tumor from the neck of James M. Venable. Long subsequently removed a second tumor from Venable, and later used ether as an anesthetic in amputations and childbirth. The results of these trials were published in 1848 in The Southern Medical and Surgical Journal.

Although Long is regarded as the first to have used an ether anesthesia in surgery, William T. G. Morton, an American dentist publicly demonstrated the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic in 1846 in Boston, Massachusetts.