Open Drop Ether

Mom's story about the old days of anesthesia.
Apparently "open drop ether" was an anesthetic technique that she used for years. Ether was dropped onto a gauze mask worn by the patient. Keeping track of vital signs was the only monitoring system. This was back in the low tech days when they could bring a baby into the dining room to monitor recovery while they ate. One reason that ether is no longer used is that it is highly flammable. "That is the reason that electrical outlets in operating rooms are up high, right? Because ether sinks?" (A bit of trivia I knew.) This reminded her of a demonstration one of the professors did. From a container of ether up high, he lit a match to some papers down low. Unfortunately other things on the desk started to catch fire and he had to staunch flames for a while before continuing. He often had things go wrong. Another time, he gave some morphine to a cat to demonstrate how it sped it up. He probably gave it too much because the cat sped around the room so fast no one could catch it. And in one of his examples comparing the effectiveness of a medicine, the wrong rat died.