1846. On October 16, William T. G. Morton (1819-1868) made history by being first in the world to publicly and successfully demonstrate the use of ether anesthesia for surgery. This occurred at what came to be called "The Ether Dome," at Massachusetts General Hospital on patient Edward Gilbert Abbott.

In 1999, a patient in a persistent vegetative state due to a motor accident was seen to be twitching by one of his nurses. His doctor prescribed a common sleeping pill, zolpidem, in case this twitching was caused by discomfort. The doctor crushed it on a spoon, fed it to the patient, and was shocked when just half an hour later, the comatose person made a noise for the first time in five years.

This simple treatment has since been tried with several other patients, with marvelous results. Scans have shown that areas of the brain that previously appeared black and dead will light up after the pill is administered.

Not all patients respond—in fact, around forty percent don’t show any improvement—but those who are successfully rescued from their comas are finally able to acknowledge their loved ones, and even have conversations. The effect wears off eventually, and the drug needs to be administered again to re-awaken patients. It can only be given so often, but its results are astonishing 

Restoring sight to the blind is an archetypal miracle cure, one of Jesus’ most famous feats, and about as life-changing a procedure as science may be capable of. Blindness is not a single, uniform condition; it can be variously caused by problems in the eyes, the nerves, and the brain. There is no cure-all for blindness, but there are certain rapidly-widening avenues which are providing more impressive outcomes every day.

Thanks to machine implants, people who were completely blind sometimes become capable of distinguishing color, and describing faces, food, and objects. The device works like a digital camera, creating an image and then sending signals through nerve cells to the brain.

Doctors were also able to restore sight to a man who had been blind for forty-three years; they did this with the help of stem cells, one of the most promising fields in medicine. Neither of these treatments are yet perfect, but they show what science may be capable of in the future.