The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  “Dr. Riggs and Mr. Wadsworth found my father securing his tools behind cabinet doors and inside iron-banded chests. Mr. Wadsworth presented the reason for his visit, adding that he had the hope of serving my father’s practice by proclaiming its excellent qualities to friends and acquaintances. Imagine. The most important man in the city endorsing my father’s work. Yet my father declined the honor, announcing that his practice was closed. When Mr. Wadsworth asked why, my father grew pallid. He replied with only one reason: that nowhere contained in his nature was the capacity to inflict pain. ‘Mrs. Wadsworth is brave,’ he told the gentlemen, ‘and likely has not spoken of her anguish, but I was here. I saw what she suffered in my chair. My doing, you understand. For whatever benefit the reason: my responsibility. And I will hurt no one else.’

  “Thus, my father locked his office door and gave up his livelihood. But this next fact, gentleman, is what I hope will give you the best sense of Horace Wells. Several weeks later, he returned. He accepted patients into his chair. He restored their mouths to health. With foreknowledge of the precise agony he would inflict, he once more picked up the tooth key.”

  Here, Charles Wells took in hand that dentist’s tool he’d placed on his lectern. He lifted the key and showed it to the assembly.

  “What awesome courage,” he continued. “I wonder at such courage. I marvel at the fortitude necessary to face again and again the immense and intimate pain that belonged to my father’s time and his work, and which his great discovery forever banished. How many of us here could have stomached it?”

  Charles Wells returned the key to his pocket, his speech almost finished. Perhaps that’s what soothed his nausea, the task nearly done—or maybe it was that story he’d just told. He knew he’d written something truthful that honored his father. Good enough. He needn’t tell the whole story of Horace Wells, a tale greater, in any event, than one evening’s speech. That whole saga would require uncountable nights—and voices other than his own. It would require his mother to rise from her grave and to answer questions Charles had never asked. It would demand familiarity with melancholy, with hope, with the tragedy of solace. Limited, he had told these dentists a story he could believe, words that created a father he could love as a son ought.

  Now a few in the audience clapped, hesitantly, unsure whether this pause meant the talk was finished. Being the day’s last event, its end would open the way for supper clubs and taverns and brothels. With a finger, Charles wiped the blurriness from his eyes and returned his attention to his final lines.

  “In my life,” he said, “I have read fictions about brave men who risk their sanity, their lives, and their very souls for science and humanity. The finest authors—Mr. Hawthorne, for one; Mr. Stevenson for another—have written such books: novels and stories peopled with imaginary characters. But my father was a breathing man, flesh and bone and beating, compassionate heart. Perhaps better than any other, he understood that pain is no fiction, that its tyranny is no hearthside entertainment. Grappling with it, he risked everything. Thank you for the credit you give him this day.”

  I

  HARTFORD

  The girl whimpered, then stuttered a low, gape-mouthed moan, and had you been among those in the room with her and her festering tooth on that November day in 1844, you would have been cowed by her pain, awed and struck dumb. The month had been unseasonably warm and bright, and earlier that morning a groundskeeper had enjoyed the weather as he wiped the windows clean; now a cracked pane left a bent shadow sharp on the floorboards. In the sun’s blue-yellow light, on a table pushed against a bare wall, a dentist’s tool kit lay open but not yet used. The girl whimpered again. She slumped in a straight-back chair, hands busy with a frayed ribbon knotted around a finger, eyes unblinking and damp. Her legs were shackled and her jaw distended as if from a tumor. The girl’s mother clung to a corner near a wood stove, wells of darkness around her eyes, the hem of her skirt frayed and dirty. She pressed a quivering fist against her lips. Outside the air was still, and through it traveled other howls from other rooms, carried across the grounds of this place for the insane. Beside the girl, a second woman crouched and whispered assurances. Her hem was clean. She had come that morning to comfort the lunatics, an act of charity she performed regularly on Wednesdays. This time she had brought her husband, a surgeon dentist, to fix the girl’s mouth. The dentist stood nearer to the window than the chair, backlit by the cold sunlight. He tucked his hands in the pockets of the apron he wore over his coat, said, “That’s a pretty ribbon on your finger.”

  He imagined the girl’s mouth a mix of milk teeth and permanent, thought her older than Charley, who had turned five this last August, whose teeth were still his first, perfect and white.

  Closer now, the man noticed that the girl’s arms looked a parade of scratches as if she’d raked herself through a bramble thicket. When he lifted her lip with an index finger, she flinched, exhaled a treacly, rancid breath. He palpated the tissue around the maxillary anteriors, peered back to the molars cushioned by an inflamed gum, probed until the girl’s right leg jerked. There. An ugly softening near the gum line, on the tongue side, second molar from the back. A permanent tooth, too. It could be saved, he knew: drain the gum, bur out the decay with slow turns of a hand drill, stuff the cavity with foil, a drawn-out agony. The tooth key would be quicker—for her and for him. Yank the problem. A flare of pain. But then, an absence forever in the girl’s mouth.

  When he lay an open hand across her forehead to check for fever, she howled, from pain or insanity he could not tell. Her head lolled. She spoke, words coming thick and garbled, as if through water, tongue pressing where it was not accustomed to going. “I am queen of the ants,” she said. “When ants cross the window sill, I tell them what to do.”

  In the corner, the girl’s mother said, “We can’t have ants in the bread, can we, Maggie?”

  “When they disobey me, I crush them with a bottle,” said the girl. A suck of breath, then a groan.

  The dentist kneeled before her, whispered her name until her head stopped lolling and she faced him. “There are people in India,” he said, “who pray so hard they sleep on beds of nails and feel nothing. No, don’t look at me. Close your eyes. Pray your favorite prayer that the hurt goes away.”

  Her lips worked some silent chant he couldn’t read. But she didn’t close her eyes.

  He rose, his effort to smile at the girl’s mother more of a grimace, and he excused himself. His wife followed him out of the room, closed the door behind them. In the dim passageway, he paced, his breathing shallow, gaze unfocused, his mind’s eye engrossed by the foulness of the girl’s mouth. He scratched at his cheeks, at his muttonchops.

  “You didn’t tell me it would be a child,” he said.

  “I didn’t know. The matron didn’t say. Just to bring you, that’s all.”

  “She’ll scream.”

  She touched her fingertips to his cheeks. “Be swift,” she said.

  The sound of slippers shuffling across the floor. They turned toward the interruption, a man dressed in a gingham robe, his head canted left, his lower lip distended, hands clasped near his chin, one a fist and the other its shelter. “Mrs. Wells,” he said, drawing near. “Mrs. Wells, will God show mercy?”

  Mrs. Wells took the man’s arm as if to join him for a garden stroll. His robe fell open, his nakedness made plain. She listened as he muttered, aware of his immodesty and careful to look to the far end of the passageway. He said, “On the palm, Mrs. Wells, the center is soft. Cradles the point. I drove the nails.”

  She turned him back toward her husband. The madman’s hair lay parted straight as a carpenter’s line at the center of his head. His neck appeared stretched beyond proportion, the muscles thin and ropy. His cheeks, the dentist noted, required lather and a razor. Mrs. Wells called him Simon, asked where he aimed to go.

  “The man’s disrobed, Elizabeth,” said her husband, wanting to regain her attention. He reached for the garment’s tie an
d spoke as he knotted it. “What’s awful is that children don’t resist. They make themselves so helpless. Their pain changes me. Who I become is not Horace Wells. That man—who has been a husband, a father, a son—he becomes lost, and a fiend remains who is more practiced at causing pain than any man should be. It’s happened so many times, Elizabeth. Believe this: after today, I will end my practice.”

  “You be quiet,” Simon barked at him. “You ring like a bell.”

  “I believe you,” Elizabeth said, her tone as gentle as if she were reminding Simon the lunatic about the need to keep one’s robe cinched. “Close your practice tomorrow. But today that girl’s tooth needs correction. Like any other fault.”

  She meant for her husband to recall that morning, and he did: how Charley, from his favorite spot under the family table, had refused to leave a picture book and empty the kitchen ashcan. She had summoned Horace, handed him the birch switch. Horace knew what Elizabeth expected, knew what action his own father would have taken. Yet he hesitated. He mentioned the switch in a loud, firm voice so Charley in the other room would hear. He warned of the wages of disobedience. The answer came that Charley wanted to be left alone, please, if you don’t mind. Horace tapped the switch against the floor. He scratched at his cheeks. Elizabeth scooped more ash. She scooped and scooped until the bucket brimmed. Her husband’s will, she knew, depended on her own. She whispered his name, and Horace at last fled to his son, dragged him by his pant leg from under the table. Charley wailed at the lashing, and Elizabeth in the kitchen stopped her work and told herself not to go to her son, that Charley would be improved by the discipline. As would her husband and his too-tender heart. This was how fathers made sons and how sons made fathers. Later, she brought sweet biscuits and blackberry jam to Horace in his workshop, where she found him weighing powders on a scale, a measuring stick in the back pocket of his trousers. Apothecary’s jars lay upset upon shelves, concoctions evaporated into mist from glass bowls above candle flames, and everywhere pervaded the stink of sulfur. Outside on the window ledge, birds bobbed and joggled where he’d left cracked corn. She set her tray on an unbalanced table stacked with newspapers, books, and scribbled notes. Horace thanked her. Redness rimmed his eyes. When she kissed him his lips felt swollen. He asked, was Charley behaving? and upon hearing her answer, said, “Praise God.”

  In the passageway, Simon admired the knot at his waist as if it were a rose bloom. “In Jerusalem, I was the hammer-and-nail of the Lord,” he said. “Look at me now. In Hartford, Connecticut. Unredeemed.”

  From behind the door where the girl waited, the mother called. Elizabeth now gave her full attention to Horace, her eyes to his. Girlhood friends had called this Elizabeth’s Righteous Glare. Her eyes—too large for her face, green and fire-bright—seemed always to see more deeply into you than yours could see into her, as if Elizabeth possessed power beyond normal, something sorcerous, a clear view to your secrets. Only practiced liars and lunatics could deceive her.

  “I wonder why you ever chose dentistry,” she said.

  He had often wondered the same. “Farmer’s son,” he told her, smiling. “Fond of tools, fixing and making.” A simple answer, and true, but he knew another lurked, murkier, having to do with such as this, when God’s earth held nothing brighter or blacker than a child’s vivid pain. If he could have told that to Elizabeth … but a nervous exhaustion clouded his thoughts. “I always assigned Morton to the children,” he said.

  “I’m glad Morton served some purpose in your practice. Now, I must return Simon to his room. Ask Maggie’s mother to hold her hands.”

  Then, as if Horace were already gone to his work, she straightened the collar of Simon’s robe and coaxed the madman with her favorite hymn, because she believed he ought to know God’s love even as he wandered the gore-smeared corridors in his skull.

  In the clean light of his improvised operating room, Dr. Wells wiped the girl’s nose with the bib around her neck and watched her blue eyes jitter. “Brave girl,” he said, in a voice constricted by the thickening in his throat. His muscles ached, and he wondered whether this would be the surgery when his hand would cramp. Many nights he had dreamed of his hand cramping, the tooth key locked in his grasp, surgery never ending. At the table now, he pulled a stopper from a vial; a miasma of cloves spread, and across the room the girl’s mother coughed. Carefully, he touched a cotton swab to the clove oil, then pried open the girl’s mouth with his free hand and dabbed her gum. She winced. He nudged the tooth with the butt of a long-shafted iron tool, concealing the screw-point tip with his palm so as not to alarm her; the tooth’s root held strong.

  The girl’s cheeks flushed. She breathed too fast, then not at all, then too fast again.

  He said to the mother, “What is your name?”

  “Nan,” she said.

  A decade or so younger than himself, he guessed. She had been a mother too young. An unfortunate. She wore a heavy mane of black hair past her shoulders, only enough ribbon to keep the hair from her face. The same ribbon as tied about her daughter’s finger. Her skin looked polished to translucence. Two pinprick moles grew at the corner of her right eye. He saw no ring on her wedding finger. She smiled at him. “You have a kind face.”

  He said, “You must hold her hands,” and he beckoned her to leave the corner near the woodstove.

  “Mrs. Wells?” Nan asked.

  “She has another concern.”

  So Nan came near and kneeled where Elizabeth had been, and she held her daughter’s hands. Light caught in the mother’s damp eyelashes, and Horace felt stabbed by sympathy.

  “I can pay in eggs,” she said. “I keep laying hens in an alley coop behind my room.”

  He shook his head, no, no, because his wife, you understand, Christian charity, the both of them, you know, and—heaven above—why should you pay for this? Then he looked for the spittoon. Elizabeth had assured him there would be a spittoon. The girl’s bib wouldn’t be enough. He untied his own apron, placed it over her. She tried to smile, a grotesque rearrangement of her face.

  He said to Nan, “Your face is familiar to me.”

  “I’ve seen you,” she said. “Sometimes, I’m in the taverns.”

  “Where you sell eggs.”

  She gave no answer. He positioned himself as if about to wrestle a calf, with one arm around the girl’s head and his hand ready to force open her jaw, while the other hand—as if a blind reach would decide the tooth’s fate—found the long-shafted tool with the screw tip. He blinked his vision clear, called once more on the Lord’s grace, and then noticed a new cast to the girl’s eyes, which seemed to grow smaller, tiny crystals of fading light. She saw what he held in his hand and shuddered as if from fever.

  He remembered that her name was Maggie and as quickly forgot.

  The girl’s mother, as if she could read his thoughts, said, “If you can endure her carrying on, she’ll endure whatever you do. She’s known worse.”

  “No,” he said. “She hasn’t.”

  He squeezed open the girl’s jaw.

  The tongue flapped about. He aimed the screw tip at the gum where he believed the tooth root met bone, then drove the point. The girl’s torso spasmed, but he clenched her head. Blood gagged her, muffled her sudden cry. He forced the tip deeper, dug and twisted through the softness until it touched bone. Then he pried.

  Just like a spade under a garden stone, he had instructed Morton. Unearth it.

  Sunlight and blood. Squinting into both, Horace leaned across her brow, the weight of his torso securing her head. The girl’s shoulders jumped. Her tongue twitched and pressed against the iron shaft, pressed against his fingers, tongue acting on its own, beyond the girl’s control. Everything under God’s heaven lay beyond the girl’s control.

  The screw-tip tool slipped from his fingers to the floor. He wiped his hand on his shirt, reached for the tooth key, its T-shaped handle fitting in his fist, a fast grip for fast work. Shaft into her mouth and the hook end caught, like that s
pade under a stone. He cocked his elbow—a hard twist, a crunch, and her scream hurried across his fingers, across the sticky bits of hair on his knuckles, kept traveling out of her mouth and into his face.

  He recoiled as if bitten.

  Blood on her like a necklace. Her face smeared.

  The woman, her mother, kneeled upright, staring hard at her daughter’s face, their fists clasped as if they meant to wrestle across a table, forearms taut and trembling.

  The girl’s name returned to him: Maggie.

  “Do not let Maggie go,” he said. “She may hurt herself.”

  His legs had lost their strength. He lowered himself against the far wall until he sat. With a swatch of linen from his pocket, he wiped himself from forehead down.

  Believe me, Elizabeth, that I change. Believe that, as a dentist, I am done.

  The girl sobbed now in the relieved manner of children, all the violence gone from her as it had from him, their misery still locked in the claw of his key, small, helpless, corrupted, never to do harm again.

  After midnight, outside the front door of his cottage on Lord’s Hill, Horace Wells stripped his overclothes and hung them on a peg. Even after riding Newton, the mare, through the clean, cold December night, his clothes reeked of Dutch Point: the smoke from wood-scrap fires lit by vagabonds in alleys; the greasy pig maws he’d eaten; the rude perfumes of certain women who needed only brush a man’s sleeve to leave their mark. None of which bothered him, true. Though he had suspended his practice since that business at the retreat for the insane, he was a surgeon dentist, after all, and visiting Dutch Point—where the Hog River emptied into the Connecticut—was like visiting Hartford’s mouth. The mouth of the river, the mouth of the city. No place more alive than a mouth. A dark garden. A swamp.