By one account, Zeus’s great-grandfather was the primordial Chaos, whose daughter Night (Nyx) and son Darkness (Erebos) begat two children. Named Day (Hemera) and Brightness (Aether), those offspring were respective opposites of their parents. Aether personified the brilliant blue atmosphere on and above the tops of mountains like Olympus. Around 1589 ce, Aether would be captured (right) in a woodcut created by a German-born Dutch artist named Hendrik Goltzius (1558 to 1617). Less than 2 centuries later in 1729, German chemist Sigismund Frobenius, M.D., F.R.S., inspired by the same deity, named an exceptionally flammable and volatile vapor, “Spiritus Vini Aethereus” (left). To Frobenius, aether seemed an other-worldly gas, “so volatile as it soon evaporates…it is the purest fire…it burns inextinguishably.” Though intrigued by its chemical properties, physicians allowed ether’s brilliant medicinal potential to linger in darkness until William T. G. Morton publicly demonstrated its anesthetic properties in 1846. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology. www.woodlibrarymuseum.org)