Bad Ends · STOP 13 · Public Garden
Boston built a monument to anesthesia and left every name off it.
Boston built a tall monument in the Public Garden to the discovery of ether anesthesia and left every discoverer's name off it. The dentist who held the inhaler and the physician who shared his patent were fighting over the credit, so the stone credits the Bible and a Good Samaritan in a turban instead. Walk all the way around it and look for a name.
This is stop 13 of Bad Ends. Walk it - any two stops are free.
The plate
Collected on site
Northwest corner of the Public Garden, near Arlington and Marlborough Streets
Directions
It's the Public Garden's oldest monument. The figures and reliefs are by John Quincy Adams Ward; the design is credited to the partners Henry Van Brunt and William Robert Ware.
More footnotes on the story card, in the app.
Argue about it
Whose name should be on the Ether Monument?
Both sides, with their sources, are on the story card in the app.
Sources (6)
- Monument to EtherHMdb.org marker 86191 · accessed 2026-10-10
- Ether MonumentWikipedia (lead only; cites Fenster, Ether Day, 2001; Ortega, Written in Granite) · accessed 2026-10-10
- The Ether Monument (Anesthesiology 'Classic Papers Revisited'/history page)George S. Bause, Anesthesiology 114(1):69 · 2011
- Other Monuments to Inhalation AnesthesiaAnesthesiology 109(4):578 · 2008
- Ether MonumentFriends of the Public Garden · accessed 2026-10-11
- The Ether Monument, Public Garden, BostonDetroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division · between 1900 and 1906