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At about this period, in October of 1846, Dr. W.T. Morton, a Boston dentist, administered the first ether anesthetic at Massachusetts General Hospital. It is reported that 31 days later, John Kearney Rodgers used an ether anesthetic for the drainage of a perirectal abscess and was considered one of New York's foremost general surgeons. 12 At the New York Hospital, in approximately 1848, he ligated the innominate artery, a procedure that had never been successfully performed before. Dr. Cornelius Rea Agnew (1830-1888), a surgeon at the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary, founded the Brooklyn Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1868 and the Manhattan Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1869. Dr. Gurdon Buck, an attending physician at the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary from 1851 to 1860 and a visiting surgeon at the New York Hospital, was a founding fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1847. He was well known for his facial plastic and reconstructive surgery and made enormous contributions to the development of clinical photography. He made routine use of photographs to document his surgical cases before and after operations. He was also known as the "father of intralaryngeal surgery" because of his method of laryngofissure in the treatment of laryngeal carcinoma. Before the invention of the laryngoscope, he developed a technique that reduced edema of the glottis, 13 thereby preventing suffocation. He also made contributions to orthopedic traction (Buck's extension) and anatomy of the genitourinary tract. Buck's fascia was named for him.
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