Warren's name will always he associated with two important facts: the founding of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the introduction of ether anesthesia. These two events were separated by an interval of twenty-five years, but around them both are grouped nearly all that is conspicuous in Boston medicine during the first fifty years of the last century.
In 1809, while still comparatively fresh from European teachers, he published a valuable paper on organic diseases of the heart, a subject which until then was little understood in this country; and in 1811, together with Jackson, Gorham, Jacob Bigelow and Channing, he assisted in founding the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery. This publication was ably edited and in 1828 was united with another, under the title, The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.
As a writer, Warren was lucid and strong. He had a great many things to say and he said them well.
He was a very able surgeon of the painstaking type. In those days all operations, even the most inconsiderable from our point of view, were serious matters.
With all care and method, Warren was not a timid operator. His amputations were bold and brilliant; he removed cataracts with great success; taught and practised the operation for strangulated hernia—the first surgeon in this country to do so, and against strong professional opinion here; introduced the operation for aneurysm according to Hunter's method. His excisions of bones for tumor, especially of the jaw, became famous and are classics—for are they not recorded in volumes of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal? In 1837, when fifty-nine years old, he published his magnum opus, "Surgical Observations on Tumors," a thick octavo with plates—a great collection of cases and remarks, interesting and instructive today. But all this gives only a very faint idea of his ceaseless literary activity. He was always writing; reports, memoirs, essays, lectures poured from his pen. It was a fluent pen, and had behind it a brain stored with keen thoughts and abundant information.
Always greatly interested in comparative anatomy and paleontology, he was able to secure, among other trophies, the most perfect skeleton of the mastodon which exists—the monster still preserved in the old building on Chestnut Street which has been known for sixty years as the Warren Museum. All through his life he devoted himself, like Hunter and Cooper before him, to the collection of anatomical specimens. This collection, together with the treasures of the Medical Improvement Society, passed years ago to the Harvard Medical School and formed the nucleus of the fine "Warren Museum" of that institution.
He was prominent also in the establishment of the American Medical Association, and there was that other great event with which his name is most conspicuously connected; the first public use in surgery of ether anesthesia. This was in October, 1846, when he was approaching his seventieth year. It is needless here to enter upon that most interesting and confused chapter of American surgery. Suffice it to admit, as Jacob Bigelow admitted years afterwards, that to Warren belongs the credit, in his old age, of allowing his name and position to stand sponsor for this courageous and revolutionary experiment. (See biography of W. T. G. Morton.)
The old man lived on until 1856. Fifteen years before his death his wife died, leaving him with six grown children, and two years later he married a daughter of Gov. Thomas Lindall Winthrop, who also died before him.
He kept busy almost to the end of his life, especially with his writing. His last surgical paper was published in May, 1855, just a year before his death, which closed a brief and painful illness.
Among his writings are: "Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart," Boston, 1809; "A Comparative View of the Sensorial and Nervous Systems in Men and Animals," Boston, 1822; "Surgical Observations on Tumors," Boston, 1837; "Inhalation of Ethereal Vapor for the Prevention of Pain in Surgical Operations," Boston, 1846; "The Mastodon Giganteus of North America."
Warren, Jonathan Mason (1811–1867)
Jonathan Mason Warren was born in Boston on February 5, 1811, in the house No. 2 Park Street, then occupied by his parents, and died there on August 19, 1867.
He was the second son of Dr. John Collins Warren (q. v.) and grandson of Dr. John Warren (q. v.) In 1820 he entered the Boston Latin School and remaining there through the full term graduated with his class in 1825. After studying two years with a private tutor
