The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  Boy and girl, husband and wife, four corners on a perfect square. Horace woke, ecstatic, on the floor in Morton’s cold study, and he leaned against a wall and enjoyed the heat of his tears and understood that his daughter’s name would be Helen. A few steps away, Morton sat unbalanced on a stool, tipping this way and that and laughing at something Horace could not see. Then Morton clapped together two naked jawbones from his collection as if to shape a mouth, and he fit that mouth over the spigot, opened the faucet, and let the jawbones inhale a share of the gas.

  Morton had called the building Warren’s Castle, and his naming was apt.

  The Massachusetts General Hospital imposed itself on the cityscape, a pillared fortress realized through the willpower of New England’s preeminent surgeon, Dr. John Collins Warren. At its peak, a dome sheltered the surgical amphitheater, Warren’s Roost, the high point physically and figuratively for the country’s medical profession. A surgeon’s heaven, all light and space.

  In the building’s bowels, however: a charitable hell. Even outside, passersby could hear the cries of the destitute therein. Shake the poor house and out fall its infirm, its crippled, and its decrepit, gangrenous, yellow-skinned, gouty, shrieking with syphilis—and here they land. A rich man’s doctor visits him at the mansion; a poor man’s doctor works here.

  To this place came Horace Wells, taking two stairs at a stride, his eyes bloodshot and his head light with laughing-gas dreams, a hog’s bladder full of relief tucked under his arm. He coughed to clear his lungs of some papery sensation, peelings from a wasps nest, sped his step to outpace the ghastly chorus of ailing poor. But the sound pervaded, mingling with the complaints of crows perched on the roof’s edge. Horace stopped, craned his neck to better see the birds, dark and healthy, their feathers shining violet and blue in this new day’s light.

  Something was amiss.

  Those painful cries? They recalled for him the white dog, the disembowled cardinal outside his cottage door, the mad girl at the institute whose tooth he pulled. Expectant, he waited for the change he’d only ever been able to describe as not-Horace. But nothing happened.

  Listen again, he told himself. So he closed his eyes. The crows quieted. The cries from below grew louder. Those human griefs. Merciful Lord, he thought, how pure they sound.

  Still, he remained himself.

  At the third floor landing, he caught up with a slow-climbing, ancient fellow. The older man stooped, and he wore a chaotic spray of thin gray hair, some of which had fallen out and lay squiggled across the black wool cape that covered his shoulders. He rubbed the back of his hand across his hooked nose. Lines creased his face the way fissures crease granite cliffs. Horace had the sense that he walked beside a mythological creature: a gryphon, perhaps—lion and eagle and man.

  “Dr. Warren?”

  The man canted his head without breaking stride, and a quick change in his countenance suggested that the name had a bitter taste.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m Warren.” At the fourth floor, he said, “You are the dentist.”

  Warren opened a door that led into the amphitheater, a chamber with room for several surgical tables but containing only one, and, higher, a surrounding gallery of four rows, at the moment empty. Bolted into the walls were a tangle of pulleys and hooks and rings, heavy iron and black, to stretch the intractable patient until all fight ended and the muscles relaxed enough to be cut. Sunlight dazzled Horace, an enchantment sifting through the vast skylights, by some optical science cleaner even than that outside on the street. Warren hung his cape in a wardrobe, which itself stood beside two unusual furnishings and figures: a glass case in which dangled a human skeleton, and adjacent to that an Egyptian sarcophagus opened at its top to reveal the head of an unwrapped mummy. Horace had never seen a mummy. Its skin had become a gray, shriveled substance like leather. Details in the jaw suggested that the teeth were intact.

  “Following my lecture,” Warren said, “I have a surgery scheduled during which I intend to remove a man’s arm from just above the elbow. A sawyer. Caught the arm between a log and a brick wall. Shattered the bones, infection set in. We’ll let the poor fellow breathe your gas, see how it works.”

  “I admire your book,” Horace said. He wanted to smile but nerves prevented him.

  “Which book?”

  “Comparative View of the Sensorial and Nervous Systems in Men and Animals. I found your conclusions proving God to be particularly satisfying.”

  “I did not prove the existence of God. I was very careful in my wording. ‘A single, omniscient being.’ ”

  There. Again Horace felt it. That wasps nest in his lungs. He coughed. “I took that to mean the Almighty.”

  Warren puffed, and his breath lifted bangs from his forehead. “I have faith,” he said, “and I have science. Each heartens me, but I never mistake one for the other.” He pulled notes from his briefcase, then fell silent, reading, and for a long moment as he read he lay his hand on the surgical table as if offering it comfort.

  A decade or so earlier, while apprenticing with a dentist in Boston, Horace had attended two surgeries, both in a small dismal room where his cheap-soled shoes had made an unpleasant peeling sound as he walked the floor, tacky with blood. Here in Warren’s Roost, someone had soap-scrubbed the boards. Sawdust littered the floor thickly. Knives and saws were arrayed on a white linen cloth draped over a table; beside them a deep white basin of clean water awaited the surgeon’s smeared hands and tools. Near the table was a stove for firing iron pieces into white heat to cauterize wounds.

  Through doorways high above, students now shuffled, chatting, descending the rows of the theater, choosing seats. Horace smelled the sweetness of a lit cigar. Many of the students wore sea-captain beards in that style favored by Morton and Jackson, and perhaps their ubiquity explained why Horace didn’t notice Morton until he heard someone call “Wells!” and saw his former student waving from a topmost seat.

  Horace waved back. Then he noticed a student point at him, comment to another, who turned to hide his laugh. Feeling conspicuous with an animal bladder clutched under his arm, Horace sought Warren, who had moved with his notes to an alcove. He whispered, “Where, sir, may I place this?”

  “Nowhere. Hold it until I summon you.”

  Horace shifted the burden to his other arm.

  “This is a Bulfinch building, I hear,” he said. Warren grunted, his attention on his notes. Horace said, “He also designed the state house in Hartford.”

  “And the United States capitol building,” said Warren. “What is your point?”

  “That there are connections between our cities.”

  “Obvious on its face.” Warren put aside his notes and addressed Horace directly. “I stopped in Hartford once. En route to Yale. Ate at some inn where the cook charred the steak. Did I mention that you’ll speak about your theory following my lecture?”

  “You did.” Horace paused, unsure whether to speak what was on his mind. “It’s not a theory, doctor. It’s a discovery.”

  “The human brain works efficiently and with its own secret genius—of which pain is a part. It is a complicated phenomenon. I doubt you’ve solved it.”

  “I do not claim to understand pain—”

  “Morton showed me your letter. You think you’ve come upon God’s own breath, but you mustn’t romanticize scientific inquiry, and you must consider history. Physicians once believed opium would erase all pain. Then there was that Mesmer foolishness. We’re all looking for heaven on earth, Dr….”

  “Wells.”

  “… but we left Eden long ago. I doubt our banishment ends because of what’s inside that sheep sack.”

  “This is a pig’s bladder.”

  Warren nodded. “Apparently, I need more study in barnyard anatomy.”

  Then he retrieved his cape from the wardrobe, fastened it off his shoulders, and stood straight as his stooped back would allow—becoming again the lion-eagle-man.

  Stepping out to his sta
ge, he roared a lecture about organic diseases of the heart. Horace tried to listen, but he could not concentrate. First Morton and Jackson, now Warren, had attempted to make a chimera of his prospects. He reached into his shirt and touched his own tooth, squeezed the hardness of it between his fingers, assured by its familiar jaggedness. Looking up, he found the mummy staring at him—its settled features, its immortal face, coaxing him near. He stepped closer and with a finger in the air traced the sharpness of the temporal line and the sunkenness of the sphenoid bone. At the cheeks, he noticed, the zygomatic bones sat wide, and the nose flattened at the tip, and the lower jaw sat so far back as to make an overbite. The lips receded to show brown teeth, a gentle eternal smile that seemed to say, “Death isn’t so bad.” Horace whispered without expecting an answer, “What killed you?”

  Had the mummy wanted to reply, and had death allowed such a thing, had priests not removed his tongue, and had his larynx not been calcified for centuries, he would have said, “I asphyxiated. A need to sneeze. I aspirated an almond.”

  Horace whispered again.

  A bee sting is what the mummy recalled, that first memory of pain. At wheat planting, in the third year of boyhood. Though dead these centuries, he felt certain of his recollection; he had always used painful episodes as a way to mark his personal history. Knifing, bright pains inside his skull had coincided with the summer his brother was born; the day when a hard knee to the testicles liquefied his intestines was also the day his father said, “You’ve become a man.” What the mummy most wanted to tell Horace was that in anger he once clenched his wife’s hand and broke three of her fingers. Her knuckles healed crookedly and ached thereafter, making her useless and a discomfort to him every time he watched her eat, so he sent her away and married another. That was during pomegranate harvest; his sixteenth year. He had felt so old.

  The mummy’s face seemed to turn upward a bit, as if in prayer. Horace wondered if it was a trick of the light.

  The mummy wanted to say, “We dead can’t hurt anyone. That’s a comfort.” But because he could not speak, the mummy turned his attention back to Dr. Warren, who was about to finish his lecture on hazards to the human heart. The mummy had heard it before. It was his favorite. He wanted to explain to Horace what harming people—even to preserve their health—does to a man’s heart. He’d seen Dr. Warren change over the years, become steel. “His work,” the mummy wanted to say, “has scraped off his soft spots. He is all hardness.”

  Then Warren was calling, identifying Horace to his students only as a surgeon dentist from Hartford, so that Horace felt the need to present himself by name and to establish his authority by listing his credentials. Speaking too quickly, he enumerated what he knew of nitrous oxide, what he’d learned from Gardner Q. Colton’s exhibition coupled with his own observations. He showed his tooth on a chain; a few students clucked. He spoke of how when breathing the gas he’d heard heaven’s bell tolling. He said that he’d felt nothing when his tooth came free. When he finished, some students coughed. The cigar smoker tapped his ash. Asking for questions, Horace received none.

  Warren tugged a tasseled rope affixed to the wall, and somewhere outside the chamber a bell rang. After a few moments the door near the mummy opened and in shuffled a man, barefoot and trembling, wearing only a muslin robe, his left arm gathered in a sling: the sawyer with his shattered bone. Blood and pus had stained the cloth brown, and with the man came a pungent, nauseating odor, something like a drunkard’s vomit. The man startled when he saw the mummy, backed toward the door when he noticed saws and knives. Warren took him by the arm that was whole and whispered to him. Horace smiled as if he and the man had just met at church choir rehearsal, but he felt embarrassed by the falsity of it.

  “Dr. Wells, will you explain the procedure to the patient?”

  As Horace spoke, the patient stared one by one at each pulley and iron ring, each hook. His skin shined with fever-sweat, and his whiskers needed a razor. Green and yellow bruises colored his skin from damaged arm to neck, and he stood so as to give his good shoulder to the world, to let it receive the blows the other could not bear.

  The man cocked his head toward Horace, then spoke, his voice a scrape in the air. “I’ll not feel a thing?”

  Horace nodded.

  “You go first.”

  Some laughter from the gallery. Horace noticed the grins, including Morton’s. And now that of Jackson, too, who had arrived and sat by Morton, his eyes looking nowhere, mouth open as a fish’s.

  Horace said to the man, “I had a tooth pulled and felt nothing.”

  The patient barked. He inhaled as if it were his last breath, then rasped, “I’d rather take a pistol ball in the ear than lie on that table.”

  Warren touched the man’s good shoulder but was shrugged away. With a last sad look at the mummy, the sawyer stepped from the amphitheater, closing the door behind him as if on a room of sleeping children.

  “Time and again, this happens,” Warren said softly, for Horace only. “I don’t begrudge any of them.” He stepped back out before the gallery.

  “Gentlemen, we have no patient. Thus, we have no exhibition.”

  The response was immediate and mundane: notebooks shut, leather straps buckled, a general shuffle and murmuring. Horace watched the students turn from him as if he’d never been, and he felt that wasps nest in his lungs flake apart into dry bits. He coughed twice, but the sensation still plagued him. What now? All this way to Boston, and for nothing? “But Dr. Warren!” he was saying, “but Dr. Warren!” though Warren didn’t seem to hear, was instead answering questions put to him by a crowd of students.

  Horace clutched his bladder, fought the urge to find a quiet spot where he could breathe the gas, calm himself, forget how his discovery—and he himself—had been dismissed.

  Then he noticed Morton pointing to a student sitting near him and motioning for Warren’s attention. Even from Horace’s distant vantage, he could see that the student’s face was swollen along the left jaw.

  “This one,” shouted Morton. “He needs a tooth pulled.”

  Soon, Horace was peeking into the young man’s mouth. The student sneezed, then groaned and complained about the combined misery of head cold and toothache, but he declined immediate surgery because he needed to keep a social appointment. Perhaps later? Talk of schedules followed, and Warren declared that if an exhibition could be arranged for after his supper, he would attend. Hearing that, most students agreed also to change their evening plans. The amphitheater had been reserved for later that night, but Warren knew of a hall on Washington Street and agreed to see to the details.

  “A tooth offers less drama,” he said, “but that’s fine. I prefer a quiet evening.”

  A half hour later, Horace and Morton walked through the coal-smoke dusk of a winter’s late afternoon, heading in the direction of Morton’s lodging. The latter walked with fists in his coat pockets; Horace kept his hands busy, fingers alighting on the bladder’s faucet one moment, scratching at his cheeks the next. He worried that Morton might think him apprehensive about the evening, and he did not want to show Morton any weakness. Though perhaps he was apprehensive, a bit. The bladder he hugged against his body carried so many of his wishes. Courage, he told himself. Delay does not foretell disaster.

  “But Warren—you were right, Will. He doesn’t believe me.”

  “I’m convinced, though. Last night I lost all doubt. The gas is a miracle.”

  Around them, Boston was in full roar. Mongrels barked at lowing cattle, bells tinny and loud around their necks. A Negro house servant dumped broken lobster shells in the gutter and with a shovel buried them under dirty snow. Drunkards cheered as tavern workers rolled rum barrels down a ramp into a cellar. From up the street came a one-eyed man hauling a cart through the slush, and in a clear tenor he sang out his wares: pots, pans, ropes and twine, horseshoes full of good fortune.

  Horace stopped in front of a building newer than its neighbors. Morton turned back. “What
?” he asked.

  “This bookstore,” Horace said, pointing. “When I apprenticed, a lodging house stood on its site. One evening on my way home, I joined a crowd to watch it burn.”

  “I know the store’s owner. I’ve filled a cavity for his wife.”

  Horace peered in the window at his reflection, then past it to the books on display. “It’s a thing to see, a big building like that aflame. Even in November, its heat made me want to shed my coat. But a woman stood among the crowd, and I couldn’t be so immodest.”

  Morton chuckled. Horace glanced over his shoulder at him but didn’t smile.

  “She kept shouting a name, voice strong at first, though growing shrill. Timbers exploded, cracking like musket fire. We could still hear her scream the name, her shrieks. Her son’s name, we later learned.”

  “What was he called?”

  Horace meant to speak, but when he inhaled cold air seized his lungs. He coughed, and one hack led to another, such a wracking that his eyes teared. When he recovered, he said, “She rushed in. A wall collapsed, eased itself into the rubble. A great flame erupted, and at last we took action, seeking water and buckets. But no one followed into the ruin.” Now the store window showed him bent as if the woman’s pain yet burdened him. He supposed it did. Straightening his back, he said, “I should purchase a book.”

  Morton spit on the sidewalk. “A strange atonement.” He tapped the bookstore’s wall with his boot toe, and when next he spoke his voice had the practiced hush of a conspirator. “Wells. That business …”

  “Which business?”

  Horace knew but had decided not to make this conversation easy, and Morton, as if he understood, smiled a mean smile. When he spoke again he raised his voice so even passersby could hear. “The woman in my chair that day. My own immodesty.” Horace gave no reaction. Let Morton lift himself up from the gutter.

  “I’m grateful for your continued discretion,” Morton said, “especially around my Elizabeth. But a contract is a contract, and I have felt obliged to follow ours. Your early leave-taking damaged the business. I should be the party demanding restitution.”