Ether Dome: How General Anesthesia Silences a Neuron

On October 16, 1846, William Morton demonstrated ether anesthesia to a surgical audience at Massachusetts General Hospital's amphitheater — the "Ether Dome" — turning surgery from an ordeal endured while conscious into a procedure performed on a silenced nervous system. This simulator renders the cellular mechanism underneath that discovery: a real spiking Izhikevich neuron and a population of GABA-A chloride channels whose occupancy follows a Hill-equation dose-response curve. Raise the ether concentration past the patient's EC50 and watch the chloride shunt clamp the membrane potential, the firing rate collapse, and the traveling action potential on the axon disappear — the same threshold behavior anesthesiologists target with minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) dosing today.