Based on the book Triumph Over Pain (1940) by René Fülöp-Miller, it tells the story of Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, a 19th-century Boston dentist who discovered the use of ether for general anesthesia.

The film stars Joel McCrea and Betty Field, and features Harry Carey, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn and Porter Hall.

In the brief first flashback to several years after his discovery, Morton mortgages his farm to pay for a trip to Washington, D.C. to meet President Franklin Pierce.

The second flashback, follows Morton and Lizzie's courtship, early married years, and his tribulations as a dentist with patients who fear the pain of dental operations.

Morton consults his former professor Charles T. Jackson, who cantankerously suggests cooling the gums and roots with topical application of chloric ether.

He asks Morton's assistance at a planned tooth extraction at Harvard Medical School before the class of prominent surgeon John Collins Warren.

Morton refuses to do so until his pending patent is granted, but says that in the meantime he will let all hospitals and charitable institutions (though not his rival dentists) use his compound free of charge.

The Medical Society's men declare this unacceptable, so surgeon Warren says he has no alternative but to perform the scheduled amputation without anesthesia.

Morton, written by Preston Sturges, Irwin Shaw, Les River, Charles Brackett and Waldo Twitchell.

The film was to be directed by Henry Hathaway, produced by Arthur Hornblow Jr. and William LeBaron, with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan to star as Morton and Eben Frost.

It's unlikely that any footage was actually shot at that time, but Paramount did go so far as to check with historians and dental organizations to confirm the screenplay's depiction of Morton, finding that opinion was divided on his character and on his claim to have discovered the first practical anesthesia.

[1] In fact, when Rene Fulop-Miller's book Triumph over Pain was published in 1940, it caused a storm of controversy, as many disputed its claims regarding Morton.

Paramount executives were losing interest in the project, but Sturges had become enthralled by it, seeing an opportunity to combine the themes of sacrifice, triumph and tragedy with elements of madcap, satire and the fickleness of fate and luck.

Sturges' commercial and critical success was such that the studio executives, though sceptical of the Morton movie, were willing to indulge him and let him direct it if at the same time he would keep turning out the kind of films which were proven hits.

Sturges wished to eschew the "traditional smugness" of the "hand-in-the-bosom-prematurely-turned-to-marble form of biography," the "Pasteur manner, where every character knows his place in History.

"[citation needed] Paramount did not immediately release the film, because they disliked the non-sequential arrangement of the scenes, the tone of some of the acting, and the prologue.

Sturges had shot the prologue as a voice-over to open the film: One of the most charming characteristics of Homo sapiens, the wise guy on your right, is the consistency with which he has stoned, crucified, hanged, flayed, boiled in oil and otherwise rid himself of those who consecrated their lives to further his comfort and well-being, so that all his strength and cunning might be preserved for the erection of ever larger monuments, memorial shafts, triumphal arches, pyramids and obelisks to the eternal glory of generals on horseback, tyrants, usurpers, dictators, politicians, and other heroes who led him, from the rear, to dismemberment and death.

It should be almost unnecessary then to tell you that this man, whose contribution to human mercy is unparalleled in the history of the world, was ridiculed, reviled, burned in effigy and eventually driven to despair and death by the beneficiaries of his revelation.

Dwarfed by the magnitude of his revelation, reviled, hated by his fellow men, forgotten before he was remembered, Morton seems very small indeed until the incandescent moment he ruined himself for a servant girl and gained immortality.

It reads in part (hesitation ellipses in original): Morton: "[T]oday at the hospital ... the Medical Society wouldn't let them use the Letheon ... unless they knew what it was so ... they asked me what it was."

The downside of the elimination of this scene was, however, that the audience was all the less aware of how the remaining events in the first flashback sequence, especially as further whittled down by the studio, related to the story.