Crawford Long

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Crawford Long.

Crawford Williamson Long (November 1, 1815 – June 16, 1878) was an American physician and pharmacist. He was born in Danielsville, Madison County, Georgia. He received his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1839. He performed the first surgical operation in general anesthesia induced by ether.

Although William T.G. Morton is well-known for performing his historic anesthesia on October 16, 1846 in Boston, Massachusetts, C.W. Long is now known to be the first to have used an ether-based anesthesia. William T.G. Morton is now sometimes credited as performing the first "public" demonstration of ether as a surgical anesthetic, however this is also erroneous as Dr. Long publicly demonstrated the use of ether as a surgical anesthetic on numerous occasions before 1846. In 1854, Long requested William Crosby Dawson, U.S. Senator, to present his claims to the attention of Congress [1].

After observing the same effects with ether that were already described by Humphry Davy in 1800 with nitrous oxide, C.W. Long used ether the first time on March 30, 1842 to remove a tumor from the neck of his patient, Mr. James M. Venable. Long subsequently removed a second tumor from Venable and used ether anesthesia in amputations and childbirth. The results of these trials were published several years later (in 1848), in The Southern Medical and Surgical Journal. An original copy of his publication is held in the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

He was a member of the Demosthenian Literary Society while a student at the University of Georgia and shared a room with Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. Long was a cousin of the famous western legend Doc Holliday. He died in Athens, Georgia.

Long County, Georgia and Emory University's Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia are named in his honor. The Crawford W. Long Museum in downtown Jefferson, Georgia, has been in operation since 1957.

A statue of Crawford Long currently stands in the crypt of the United States Capitol as one of the two designated to represent the state of Georgia.