John Collins Warren (surgeon, born 1778)

John Collins Warren was a Boston surgeon and teacher who stands at the centre of the early history of surgical anesthesia. Born in 1778, the son of the Harvard anatomist John Warren, he studied in London, Paris and Edinburgh before joining his father in practice and teaching. He held the Hersey professorship of anatomy and surgery at Harvard until 1847, served as the first dean of Harvard Medical School, helped found the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and was a founding member and first surgeon of Massachusetts General Hospital. On 16 October 1846 he operated on a patient under ether given by William T. G. Morton, the public demonstration that carried surgical anesthesia around the world; the record also notes that he had earlier hosted Horace Wells's failed nitrous oxide trial. He died in 1856 and gave his collections to Harvard, where they became the Warren Anatomical Museum.