The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  Still, nothing Elizabeth wanted inside the cottage.

  So he stayed out of doors as he undressed in that deliberate manner of one who has enjoyed his beer but not too much. A mug early, a mug late. He had his rules.

  Though tonight hadn’t he drunk a third?

  In a tavern near the docks on the southern bank of the Hog River, he’d spent many evenings studying pain and its relief. He’d gathered an inventory of complaints: a throbbing knee, a burn in the gut, erratic explosions behind the eyes. Ailing men took his pennies and in exchange let him poke where they hurt and where they didn’t. He proffered tinctures, waved his fingers before their eyes, observed what herb or salve or balm brought relief and what didn’t. When he could, he treated them. They made fun of his name, called him Dr. Wails, and tolerated him better, he found, when he had beer on his breath.

  It was never pleasant, this work, and tonight had been worse. Monkey-Face Pete brought a boil; relief required a knife. “Like you ripped off a toe,” Pete had said, grimacing. Such agonies put sweat on Horace’s lip, gave a tremble to his hand, and inwardly he cursed his morbid compulsion toward others’ pains. Repulsed and drawn all at once, and inflicting pain to cure it! Horrible. The contradictions confounded—how he could not bear a patient’s suffering in his chair yet sought pain in the taverns. Perhaps pain made more sense amidst the rough and vulgar than it did in the rest of his neat and ordered life.

  He sat on the bench outside the cottage door to unlace his boots. Wanting a last bit of the clear night before joining Elizabeth in bed, he turned toward the half moon, hanging behind a veil of clouds. Would pain feel different up there? Immersion in water eased some aches, he knew, particularly if the water were excessively cold or hot. How would the moon’s atmosphere change a man’s sensation of burn or bruise? He reached into a liner pocket of his coat, wrote his thoughts with the charcoal pencil and notebook he kept there. Earlier at the tavern he’d written, “exhilaration” and “Mesmer’s hypnosis,” and he’d written “pain’s purposes,” and now he thought about those things and studied the half moon. He’d have to go back. Test new concoctions. Have patience. That moon had shined on human suffering since the first parents fled Eden, and neither laudanum nor Mesmer nor clove oil nor a draft guzzled from a hollowed-out unicorn’s horn had vanquished the pain of centuries. It would be reasonable to spend months—years!—in search of his variant of the philosopher’s stone. Powder, potion, ointment, vapor. Someday, some alchemy would work. Then they’d call him Dr. No-Wails.

  As he jotted those thoughts about the moon, he startled at a noise—rapid and loud. He turned, wary of whatever thrashed about in that shadowy, denuded forsythia. Holding a lamp, he edged near and noticed a small bird. Brown, crested. A female cardinal, not perched but dangling oddly, a leg broken and wedged between twigs. He brought his face close, then snapped back when she fluttered her wings. That was the noise. Wings beating too fast to see. After a short pause, the burst repeated, each random flutter a fury.

  Long breaths, he told himself. Identify your response. Yes. It had a familiarity. The same as each time he stuck his fingers into the mouth of a suffering patient. A person in pain behaves irrationally, unpredictably, and it was the unpredictability in the bird that flustered him. He preferred the rational, the described, the anticipated. The mouth, for example, was a predictable place. When new teeth pushed up, old teeth fell away. Without proper care, teeth rotted. When gums were cut, they bled. All of these were the unsurprising responses of the human body. But when drill gouged tooth, the patient’s actions could not be foreseen. Many remained docile, understanding that pain must be inflicted to relieve pain. Some strong women kept placid as tonight’s half moon but moaned low and looked at him with a child’s imploring eyes. Once, a dockworker struck him a blow that somehow bruised both shoulder and neck.

  As with people, this bird. He peered closer and noticed that the cardinal’s abdomen lay gashed open; its entrails, gray and glistening, hung free. The bird fluttered and chirped, and Horace thought to grab and kill it. What hope did it have of recovery, broken-legged and eviscerated?

  But he thought a kindness would be to free it from the tangle, allow it to die in a place of its own choosing. Every suffering creature wants to be home. He calculated, deciding that the bird could do no lasting damage—a scratch or peck perhaps. Thus, he thrust his hand into the heart of the shrub. The cardinal thrashed, its orange beak opening, silently now. Horace snapped the twig where the leg twisted, and the bird fell, righted itself before it struck ground and lifted, dragging its viscera through the air, disappearing into the dark, damp night.

  Elizabeth was awake, of course, though huddled under the quilts, a lamp burning softly on the table next to Horace’s bedside. He slid in beside her, the quilts and woolens whispering around them, and she kept still even as he nestled close and wrapped an arm around her waist just above her hip. He moved his hand about her ruffled gown until he felt comfortable and thought she might, too.

  She said, “It’s late.”

  “I did good work.” He rubbed his feet against each other, sucked in a deep breath.

  She took his hand, grunted, and returned it to his side. “Your hands smell. Scrub up, will you?”

  He pushed himself out of bed, and when he returned kept his back to her, hugged the edge of the mattress, let a clean hand dangle off the side.

  “I found an injured bird when I came home. Trapped in the forsythia. I set it loose.”

  “Charley fussed before bed,” she said.

  She shifted nearer, pulled his hand up to her face to sniff his fingertips. Then she kissed them. In his ear, she whispered, “I miss how you once smelled of cloves.”

  “You used to hate that smell.”

  “I did. Now I miss it.”

  Clever, his Elizabeth. Each of the several times he had quit dentistry came with his fierce conviction that he would never go back. This time was no different. But he knew his responsibilities, that he could not quit dentistry for life. Elizabeth meant only to coax. “I’ll return soon,” he said, squeezing her hand. “I know the accounts are low.” The sleepy noise she made sounded like assent.

  Later, she kicked her legs as if disturbed in a dream, and the kick woke him. A nightmare, he supposed, and when she whimpered he rested a hand on her shoulder and whispered, “Everyone’s safe,” and she calmed but didn’t wake. He lay there a while, and imagined how in the morning he’d explain to her how his Dutch Point work was still dentistry, in a way, even if it didn’t pay.

  Restless, he left bed, pulled on his coat and boots, and visited Newton in the small barn with its single stall. With a hammer he tapped the wafer of ice that capped the mare’s bucket. Brushed her by the dusty yellow light of an oil lamp. His head ached a bit, and he recounted aloud, as if to the mare, how many mugs he’d drunk. Three, wasn’t it? When he finished with Newton, he snuffed the lamplight and strolled around the cottage, hoping the cold air might relieve whatever ailed his head. Six years in this simple home, with room enough in the parlor for Elizabeth to Bible study with half a dozen ladies, a guest bed upstairs should his mother ever visit from New Hampshire. A few instruments of ease, such as the coal sifter for the stove—his own invention, which he’d made in secret to surprise Elizabeth, and in which she delighted. He had selected this parcel with care, for its half-mile distance from the city, its oak woods, its vistas. From this yard he often stared across the Connecticut River Valley, enjoying its virgin green in spring and its low fog of winter, listening to railroad clatter and factory bells ringing. On clear days city voices reached Lord’s Hill, shouts about who knows what, though it seemed that with each passing week those voices—once infrequent and distant—sounded louder, nearer. The years would prove him right; Hartford’s bounds were spreading like nodding thistle in a pasture, and soon the city would follow Asylum Avenue right up to the Wellses’ doorstep. Even this night, breathing the cold quiet and studying the dark valley and the darker river, Horace felt an u
nease in his chest as if his cottage were already surrounded by the office buildings and schoolhouses to come, Yankees living shoulder to elbow. He decided he would sell the cottage before then. Yes, he thrived amid people and their bustle, but a little land was necessary to his evergreen soul. An outskirts man, a man at the edges. Always wanting some of this, some of that. Hartford’s mud but also the meadows of Lord’s Hill. Doctor of pain, and someday, pray God, His instrument that will wash it all away.

  Clouds had passed, the stars and moon shined clear. He noticed his shadow despite the dark, and looked to the moon, which was full and round as hope.

  But hadn’t it been at half earlier?

  He recalled the calendar, and yes, it predicted a full phase with no expectation of eclipse. Why had he seen it earlier as half? He gazed skyward awhile, perplexed, imagining the science that might explain this mystery. Finding none, he felt himself in the presence of magic and decided that for the moment magic would suffice.

  Across the river the sun’s light had started to color the lowest sky. Soon the printers would put the day’s news in their windows, let readers carry it home for a half-dime. A walk to buy a newspaper might relieve that ache in his head. Yes, a walk and a visit to the barber. So he fetched his father’s shaving kit, then launched himself down the road with such speed that rocks rolled underfoot, and he nearly stumbled.

  Coles Barber Shop, near the train station, was a family business begun by the current Mr. Coles’s grandfather, who had made a scandal in 1773 when outside the shop door he hung a wooden sign that read No Loyalists. All these decades later the sign remained, though of loyalists in Hartford there could be no more than three—toothless arthritics who expressed their allegiance by eating off Hanover silver behind shuttered windows. Mr. Coles kept the sign posted—and his razors sharp and mirrors clean—because he believed that good habits led to habitual customers. Among his best customers were the dentist, Horace Wells, who in years past had patronized the shop alongside a man who was then his student, William T. G. Morton. Dr. Wells always paid for both their shaves. A year or so ago the pair had left to open a Boston office, sell some new kind of dental plate. Mr. Coles didn’t know what acrimony broke that partnership, only that Dr. Wells came back to Hartford and Dr. Morton remained in Boston. Now and again, though, Dr. Morton returned with his wife to visit her kin in nearby Farmington, and he stopped for a shave. These days, neither dentist had a good word for the other. And that’s why on this December morning Mr. Coles steeled himself as Horace Wells jingled the doorbell of the shop. The barber had just finished lathering William Morton’s chin.

  Wells hesitated at the threshold. Mr. Coles wiped his hands, and he caught the eye of the boy he employed, a foot-scuffler now sweeping cut hair into a pile. The boy understood and swept his way to the far side of the shop.

  “Horace!” cried Morton. A dollop of lather dropped to his lap. “I was just asking Coles whether he expected you. How are you?”

  “Headache at the moment.” Wells grimaced, then mumbled as if making a note to himself. “It’s mostly a dull gnawing at the back of my neck. Worse when I talk.”

  “Better to be silent then.”

  Wells hung his coat.

  The men all three shook hands, then Wells found a chair. Mr. Coles worked under Morton’s jaw, reminding himself not to rush, and Morton stretched so his chin pointed toward the ceiling. Given that he had something of an underbite, it took little effort.

  Wells said, “My Elizabeth would want me to ask.”

  “I’m not convinced I owe you a penny,” Morton replied. “I’ve a man looking over the papers. He’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “The contract was plain—”

  “We don’t talk money in Coles Barber Shop,” said Mr. Coles.

  “An agreeable protocol,” said Morton. “What should we argue instead? Methods for soldering dental plates?”

  “That sounds right,” said Coles. “I’d like to hear that.”

  He gestured to the foot-scuffler, who put aside his broom to tie a bib around Wells’s neck. Wells handed his kit to the boy.

  “Still carrying that old razor, Dr. Wells?” said Mr. Coles. “Lost its good edge years ago. You’d better have a new one. I’ve nice kits for sale. Imported from London.”

  Wells shook his head. “It was my father’s.”

  “I respect that. Hard to keep an edge on a razor that old, that’s all.”

  The boy took Wells’s razor and stropped it.

  “Can’t afford a new razor kit, can you?” asked Morton. “Scuttlebutt says you’ve given up dentistry again.”

  Wells’s glance prompted Mr. Coles to shake his head as if to say “not from me.” He did not gossip, nor would he about Dr. Wells. He did not think less of the man for closing up shop. He’d hurt customers, too, though an inadvertent razor nick seldom troubled him, and sometimes he did slip his blade into the chin of a rude man because the fellow deserved it. Worst was the time his mind wandered, and he’d snipped a farmer’s earlobe nearly clean. You can bet that day Mr. Coles shut his doors. The way his hands trembled as he keyed the lock, he feared he’d never cut hair again.

  “A temporary leave,” said Wells.

  “This is becoming habit with you. Is this the third, fourth time? It’s un-American, Horace. We don’t take holidays. It’s what separates us from the French.”

  “I’m not on holiday. I work every day.”

  “It’s not work unless you get paid for it. Whatever you’re about is a hobby.”

  “What I’m about matters a good deal more than a hobby, Will, and you know it.”

  Mr. Coles shook lather from the razor into a sink, cleaned another patch of Morton’s cheek. “We don’t argue money is what I said.” Then he addressed the foot-scuffler. “Give Dr. Wells a neck and shoulder rub. Loosen the muscles back there. Relieve that headache before the shave.”

  The foot-scuffler began to knead, digging his thumbs in near Wells’s shirt collar. Mr. Coles observed the dentist’s whole body go slack in reply. What awful work to be a dentist, he thought, and thanked heaven that modern barbers were done with teeth-pulling and bloodletting.

  “We’re not arguing money,” said Morton. “We’re defining labor and leisure. Which is which.”

  Wells yelped. He pitched out of his seat, hand to jaw. The boy looked stricken. “I was just rubbing,” he said, “like you showed me.”

  Wells raised his foot as if to stamp the floor, a grimace tightening his face. He lowered that foot carefully but kept a hand still to his jaw. A groan came from deep within him, and breath puffed through his nose.

  Morton wiped his face with the bib tied around his neck, followed Wells about the room until he cornered him. “Lean back.” Morton said, reaching for Wells’s mouth. “Let me see.”

  “There was no jaw pain until just now,” said Wells. “A headache, that’s all.”

  Morton probed with his fingers. “I’ve known patients who felt toothaches in other parts of the body,” he said. “Yes, there’s an inflammation, slight. I’ve got my tools.”

  Wells pushed past Morton and returned to his chair. “Your generosity impresses me, Will,” he said, and Mr. Coles heard a seam of anger in his tone. “Thank you, but John Riggs is my dentist. I’ll trust my trouble to him.”

  Morton dragged the back of his hand across his soapy cheek. He looked at what he’d wiped as if expecting to find something repulsive there, then turned to Mr. Coles. “Am I done? I have a carriage to meet.”

  “Just a spot,” said Mr. Coles. When he finished, the barber wiped the last smears of lather from Morton’s temples and chin, squeezed dampness from the shirt collar, then took his fee, and Morton left without a nod toward Wells.

  After Mr. Coles began to chik-chik-chik the razor along Wells’s cheeks, Wells called to the boy who’d caused him pain. “Please,” he said, “forget that earlier hurt I suffered. Don’t let it darken your day.”

  “Why would it?” asked the boy, his express
ion showing honest curiosity.

  A GRAND EXHIBITION of the effect produced by inhaling NITROUS OXIDE, EXHILARATING or LAUGHING GAS! will be given at THE HARTFORD UNION HALL, THIS (Tuesday) EVENING, Dec. 10th, 1844.

  FORTY GALLONS OF GAS will be prepared and administered to all in the audience who desire to inhale it.

  TWELVE YOUNG MEN have volunteered to inhale the Gas to commence the entertainment.

  EIGHT STRONG MEN are engaged to occupy the front row, to protect those under the influence of the Gas from injuring themselves or others. This course is adopted that no apprehension of danger may be entertained. Probably no one will attempt to fight.

  THE EFFECT OF THE GAS is to make those who inhale it either Laugh, Sing, Dance, Speak, or Fight, etc., etc, according to the leading trait of their character. They seem to regain consciousness enough to not say or do that which they would have occasion to regret.

  N.B. The Gas will be administered only to gentlemen of the first respectability. The object is to make the entertainment in every respect a genteel affair.

  Mr. COLTON, who offers this entertainment, gave two of the same character last Spring, in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, which were attended by over four thousand ladies and gentlemen, a full account of which may be found in the New Mirror of April 6th, by N. P. Willis. Being on a visit to Hartford, he offers this entertainment at the earnest solicitation of friends. It is his wish and intention to deserve and receive the patronage of the first class. He believes he can make them laugh more than they have for six months previous. The entertainment is scientific to those who make it scientific.