Horace Wells, a dentist in Hartford, Connecticut, first used nitrous oxide in dentistry in December 1844. A few weeks later he travelled to Boston, Massachusetts, to demonstrate to physicians and dentists the use of nitrous oxide in painful procedures. Wells' unsuccessful demonstration of nitrous oxide for the extraction of a tooth is well known, but other details of this trip are poorly understood. A description of Wells' visit to Boston was compiled using information from 21 statements and 5 newspaper notices. The precise date and location of Wells' demonstration could not be determined. There is no primary evidence that Wells' demonstration occurred in the surgical amphitheater (Ether Dome) at Massachusetts General Hospital. Wells' demonstration of nitrous oxide probably occurred around the end of January 1845, in a public hall on Washington Street, Boston.

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Summary The year 2008 marked 100 years since the publication of Sir Frederic W. Hewitt’s description of his artificial airway. Hewitt’s airway was the first known oral airway and laid the foundations for the numerous other airways that were later developed. Oral airways made anaesthesia safer and significantly reduced the trauma associated with earlier attempts at managing the obstructed airway.

Two published versions of a letter in which Oliver Wendell Holmes, MD, recommended the name anaesthesia were identified from publications supportive of the claims of W. T. G. Morton. The earliest known publication of Holmes' letter is in a pamphlet published by Edward Warren in May-June 1847. Another version of the letter was published 12 years later in Nathan P. Rice's biography of Morton. Holmes' letter to Morton was probably lost when a substantial part of a collection of Morton's papers was damaged during storage. There are no reported copies of Holmes' letter. The currently available information does not provide any assistance in determining the correct form of Holmes' letter.

The earliest identified English definition of the word anaisthesia was discovered in the first edition (1684) of A Physical Dictionary, an English translation of Steven Blankaart’s medical dictionary, Lexicon Medicum Graeco-Latinum. This definition was almost certainly the source of the definition of anaesthesia which appeared in Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), a general-purpose English dictionary compiled by the lexicographer John Kersey. The words anaisthesia and anaesthesia have not been identified in English medical or surgical publications that antedate the earliest English dictionaries in which they are known to have been defined.