The Wood Library-Museum

The Gwathmey-Woolsey Nitrous Oxide-Oxygen Apparatus was developed to administer ether as well as nitrous oxide and oxygen. Introduced in 1912, its design was partially rooted in guidelines for nitrous oxide-oxygen anesthesia recommended by physicians Frederic Cotton (1869-1938) and Walter Boothby (1880-1953), designers of the Cotton-Boothby Apparatus. The most notable similarity between this apparatus and the Cotton-Boothby is the water-sight flowmeter, or ‘bubble bottle,’ which was first developed to estimate the rate of flow for both nitrous oxide and oxygen.

Dr. William Cavan Woolsey (1876-1919) and Dr. James Tayloe Gwathmey (1862-1944) worked as anesthetists in New York City. Dr. Gwathmey was a dynamic and talented physician whose extraordinary career profoundly impacted the profession of anesthesiology. Gwathmey was among the first American private-practice anesthesiologists and one of the very first to contend that anesthesiology was the practice of medicine. Gwathmey invented and modified a wide range of anesthesia devices, and he was a founding member of the New York Society of Anesthetists, a precursor of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. He also wrote the first comprehensive American textbook on the subject of anesthesia.