The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  “I left with cause: my partner’s turpitude. Thus, I am owed my investment.”

  The look on Morton’s face suggested that he took the thought seriously. He nodded, tugged hairs on his chin. “Turpitude?” he responded, his tone grave. “How can you say that word without giggling?”

  The medical student with the abscessed tooth and head cold did not practice good oral hygiene. This was clear to Horace that night in the hall on Washington Street when the student opened his mouth. Two teeth showed hints of cavity decay. Perhaps there would be time for that. The abscessed tooth—the mandibular second premolar—needed to be pulled and the root bed cleaned.

  “You have weak teeth,” Horace said, checking the arrangement of his tools. “Do them a favor and brush more often.”

  The student mumbled, “My father also has weak teeth.”

  “Some people have the teeth of horses,” Horace said. “Others have teeth like chickens.”

  “Chickens don’t have teeth.”

  Horace smiled. “Because they don’t brush.”

  Other students crowded near, some standing on chairs or stools to see. Warren loomed behind the patient, who sat in a bentwood chair, there being no dentist chair with a proper headrest. The patient tilted back his head, and Horace asked for light. Morton, who held the hurricane lamp, adjusted its position. “My arm tires, Wells,” he said. “Speed your preparations.”

  “Hand the lamp to another, if you must,” said Horace. “I’ll take my time.”

  Horace rubbed his hands on his apron to hide how they trembled. He coughed, that papery crinkle in his lungs still plaguing him. With his tongue, he worked the empty space where his molar had been. The patient sneezed, and Horace took the moment to offer a fast, silent prayer that he be worthy to convey the Almighty’s blessing of surgery without pain, that here and now the Lord would make this miracle known. But the prayer failed to calm him; his hands trembled still.

  He undid his cravat and removed his jacket, pulled at his shirt to allow air against his clammy skin. “Don’t crowd so much,” he told the students, who managed half a shuffle back at most. The patient’s eyes flitted from this face to that. Horace once more checked the order of the tools on his tray. He raised his arm to wipe his shirtsleeve across his forehead.

  Morton asked, “Are you ill, Wells?”

  “Just hold that light steady.”

  Warren, the gryphon, from his perch behind the patient’s head, had said little since arriving, only a comment about how his wife had prepared that night’s beef with dried corn and rum, “an odd concoction.”

  The boy’s name. The boy who died in the fire. Outside the bookstore, Horace had wanted to tell Morton. The boy’s name had been Will. His mother had called it. Will. Will. And the woman in Morton’s dentist chair—she, too, had cried Will, Will.

  Three breaths of the gas, and the patient giggled. “Dr. Wells,” he said, “everyone has the face of a mouse.”

  Horace opened the faucet again. He counted the patient’s breaths, and with three more shut down the faucet. Students again drew close, their sour smells and snide murmurs, and he shouted to give him room. Boston! How he loathed this city! His pulse hammered out an urge to inhale the gas himself.

  When the patient’s eyes shut and his head rolled, Warren caught, held it steady. Horace blinked sweat out of his eyes, fingered open the patient’s mouth, fit the tooth key in place. A quick yank, and the tooth came clean.

  But the patient yelped.

  The wasps nest in Horace’s chest broke apart.

  “Not asleep?” said Morton. “What—?”

  Horace stood still, arms weak and at his side, the premolar bloody in his tooth key, the room silent with confirmation of what everyone knew all along.

  “What a wasted night,” a student said. “Just a humbug.”

  Warren let go the patient’s head, which lolled to the side, blood trickling in a crooked line from mouth to cheek to neck. The patient blinked in sequences, twice, then twice again. Groaned. Horace struggled to breathe. Flakes of wasps nest choked him. He listened with all his concentration, as if he might find that the whimper came from someone else, not his patient.

  “He felt something,” someone said.

  “Imagine an amputation.”

  Horace looked to Morton, whose face had reddened, who shook his head at Horace, then turned on his heel to leave the scene—let flames of failure consume the building. Someone laughed. Another shouted, “Hartford! Hartford, of all places!” and another guffawed. Horace lunged forward, his ear near the patient’s lips. In the giddy bustle, Horace tried to hear, tried to make sense of the roar in the room, a strange new sound above all that. Like Warren’s voice, like Morton’s, like all Boston’s voices gathered in a low, dizzying chant: Humbledy-hum. Hum-hum-aroo. Humbuggery. Humbughumbughumbug!

  And above them all, Boston’s loudest voice, the shriek of a mother, drawn by pain to death.

  January 20, 1845

  Tonight, I admit error. I failed a promising young dentist.

  I will not name him in this journal, because posterity has no need to immortalize every philosopher of science who has fallen short. We are legion.

  He believed, wrongly, that the exhilarating gas nitrous oxide could render a patient insensible to pain, and he hoped to make an exhibition of his theory here. I granted permission, and assembled students and other fine physicians at a hall on Washington Street. I permitted this gathering though the dentist’s theories struck me as fallacious. Now I know that a private exhibition was in order. If convinced, I might then have let the dentist present his findings to the larger medical community. But I was distracted—as I am too often these days—by diminishing time.

  Already I have exceeded my father’s allotment of years by seven. How long before I am called home? Sinner that I am, I overspend what hours remain. I read while walking, teach while eating, write my books on the Sabbath days. I demand efficiency! Efficiency, I have this evening learned, is itself a sort of malice.

  The dentist failed, as I noted. The patient showed evident pain.

  What happened next troubles me still.

  We should have all been saddened that the young dentist was wrong. Imagine the boon to mankind had he discovered how to impair pain and allow for surgery without suffering! For me? What a strange peace it would grant, one I’ve not known since my youth, before I took up the scalpel and saw. That is a peace the nature of which I no longer remember.

  But our medical students, of the highest quality, are yet too young, are yet strangers to failure and impatient in its presence. One spoke the word humbug, and another took up the chant. The students had rearranged schedules, canceled appointments, taken time from their studies to witness a promised miracle of apostolic proportion. Instead they saw quackery, so hissed their irritation. “All’s not so well that Wells ends,” shouted one, making a play of the young dentist’s last name (and there, I have identified him after all). One crumpled the notes he had jotted, then tossed the balled paper at the dentist’s head. I glared; he’ll hear from me tomorrow.

  When I had met the dentist earlier that day, what I saw in his face was conviction and possibility, a sense that the universe had an order he understood. Now all was chaos. The gas had betrayed him, and nothing could be trusted. Perhaps a chair would break under his weight, or a ladle of well water fail to quench his thirst; in a storm an umbrella would let through the rain. I saw all that on his face. “Another patient!” he cried. “I shut off the gas too soon. You see, he sleeps even now. That groan—it was not from the tooth pull but from something he saw in a dream. Stay! We’ll do it again. Watch—”

  He lifted a scalpel from the tray of tools, and as if lurching from some nightmare, he poked its sharp point into the patient’s left cheek. I did not see the patient’s reaction, only that blood spurted and spread across his jaw. The dentist shouted, “He sleeps, you see? He feels nothing!” He stabbed again toward the patient, who sat defenseless, his head hanging lik
e a ripe pear. I caught the dentist’s arm, called for help, and in a moment three of us held him. His eyes clouded as if with tears, and he panted. His face flushed. He had not seemed insane to me in the hours before the exhibition. He seemed insane now.

  Two men wrestled him from the building. I’ve not seen him since, and I suspect I’ll never meet him again. I left the patient in the care of his fellow students and hurried home. Perhaps putting this memory to paper will help me forget, even if by small degrees, and thereby get on with my work.

  In his dark study, among spiders and flickering candles, Morton—drunk—plays with a pair of human jawbones. He laughs and love-pecks them. Then the yellowish jaws open and close, teeth clacking, speaking to Horace, who sits on the floor nearby. “I miss the gas,” say the jawbones, a desiccated mockery of Morton’s mouth.

  “It seems not to work so well anymore.” Horace coughs, and rum sloshes over the side of his mug to wet his lap. His cheeks are wet, too; his scalp feels hot at the follicles.

  “Why only one bladder?” Clack go the jawbones. “You should have brought two.” Clack. Clack. Morton tips a mug toward the jawbones. “Rumbug-a-roo.” The bones drink up.

  What Horace knows about bones is that when exposed to air they will yellow. When exposed to sun they will bleach. Also, bones do not doubt. Bones do not worry about hell or heaven. They never reproach themselves. Bones dance in the mountains of New Hampshire when the devil plays his fiddle, his father used to say. Jawbones sitting in Morton’s palm drink from Morton’s mug and endure his kisses. While Morton’s own Elizabeth—she of the brunette ringlets—snuggles in another room under a patched bed quilt, the jawbones sitting in Morton’s palm drink from his mug and endure his kisses. Ill-mannered adulterer.

  “I didn’t plan to exhaust the bladder,” Horace says. “My discovery concerns pain—not … not … clairvoyance. Is it still so noisy outside? How this city shrieks!”

  The yellowish jaws reply with a question, something about sulfuric ether, but a nail has come loose from the floorboard and pricks Horace’s hip through his trousers. Time to stand, says the nail’s point. Time to board the train. Home to your Elizabeth. Except he must avoid the tracks. He considers whether he might prefer to lie face up or down. The idea of suicide tempts, though he sighs it away. A vision of Elizabeth robed in black—alone at graveside—troubles his heart back to the living. If he misses her now, from so near as Boston, how much more so when soul flies and body molders?

  The jawbones say, “You’ve ripped your trousers.”

  He has? That nail. He turns like a dog trying to bite its rump, fingers the tear, then loses his balance and turns some more. “Will,” he says. “Will Morton.” Standing, he turns about the study, touching his fingertips to each wall to prove a theory. Four walls, a complete inventory, and yes, it is true: no windows. How does Morton work in a room sans, as the French say, windows? You can’t watch birds if the room has no windows. Birds with their songs and their fluttering wings.

  “The papery flutter in my chest is gone,” Horace says. He claps his hands twice, then wiggles his fingers as if they are bird wings flying off. Make a note, Horace: failure cures flutters. Or humiliation does. Scissor-edged humiliation has shred the paper in his lungs, and Horace has coughed out the tatters. He’s still coughing now, which is curious, and Morton throws him a kerchief, which falls to the floor and is lost among the books and stew bowls and a broken jar of blue pottery celebrating the accomplishments of George Washington. Humbughumbughumbug-a-roo.

  “I’ll find it,” Horace says, doubling over, eyes squinting in the dark. “I’ll find it.”

  “You embarrassed me in front of Warren,” the jawbones say. “Stabbing that boy!”

  “Six breaths. I counted. He should have felt nothing. Are we friends, Will?”

  “We need to leave soon for the train.”

  “Yes, but are we friends?”

  “You’re as good a friend as I’ll ever have.”

  A puzzle, that answer. No answer at all.

  Morton stokes the stove with a wedge of dry maple. Pawing through the debris on the floor, Horace finds the kerchief. He also picks up the broken George Washington jar, waves it at Morton.

  “All men of conviction are great men,” he says. “A drunkard who drinks without regret—a great man. An adulterer who fornicates without regret—a great man. You, Will, are a great man. A truly great man.”

  “In centuries to come, schoolchildren will sing my name.”

  “A man of conviction! Blessed by the stars, by the alchemy of his humors. The blood of kings runs in you, Will, the wisdom to know when to open a bottle of rum. May you never doubt yourself.”

  “I never doubt myself. We must leave for the train.”

  “May you never.”

  Four walls and no windows, and Horace can’t hear anything outside the room, which is good because he’s had enough of listening to the shrieking city. But then Morton has him by the hand and is leading him out of the study, out of the apartment, with no farewell to Elizabeth of the ringlets, and the two stumble downstairs to the slushy streets and harsh sunlight, and Horace says no, thank you, I’m comfortable with your windowless study and your rum. A goat shrieks at him as they pass, and a cat shrieks, and a school teacher shrieks, and also a book binder, and a fellow who looks as if his only skill is at cards, and a livery boy, and a warden. Shriek. Shriek. Shriek. Morton shrieks, and Morton, you are no friend of mine to remove me into the streets of Boston, you are no friend! The train at the station shrieks to a stop. Nothing to be done about it anymore, and there’s an emptiness in his lungs where paper once fluttered, and as with all emptiness it wants filling. A shriek louder than all the others sounds through his blood and along his nerves, following marrow, sloshing through the liquid spaces of his body until it finds those empty lungs, and that’s where the shriek nests. Followed by another. The noises deafen him so he doesn’t hear what Morton says, nor does he hear the lunges of the train as it steams away from Boston, nor the woman passenger who sits across from him and keeps asking questions and who looks like neither his Elizabeth nor Morton’s but instead like a wading bird, a bittern, and he doesn’t hear the command to switch trains in Springfield, but that doesn’t matter because he knows he is supposed to, and when at last he arrives in Hartford, he doesn’t hear his Elizabeth gasp as she meets him in darkness at the station, and he doesn’t hear her ask where are his boots, where are his boots because it is January and the slush and snow cause frostbite, humbughumbughumbug-a-roo, nor, when he reaches home, bare feet wrapped in a wool blanket, does he hear the strangled combination of bark and howl issuing from a solitary white dog which is missing a leg and balancing on the three that remain, distant, under a leafless oak tree where the cleared property ends and woods and darkness begin.

  III

  SEDGEWICK HOUSE

  HARTFORD

  In the well-appointed parlor of a three-chimneyed house on Wethersfield Avenue in Hartford, Elizabeth’s aunt, Dorothy Sedgewick, welcomed her niece with a long embrace. “Would you have an ale?” she asked. The clock showed six and fifteen on that February evening in 1845, and lamps cast halos throughout the room. Elizabeth had not visited her aunt since Horace’s Boston trip, about which Dorothy had heard rumors. Though Elizabeth had yet to mention her sorrows, they were plain given how she sat with such rigidity in that velvet-upholstered chair. Straight back. Chin out. The last clutching at composure. She needs a pick-me-up, Dorothy thought, but Elizabeth declined.

  Dorothy said, “You haven’t joined the temperance gang?”

  For Elizabeth’s favorite aunt, ale was a nightly ritual: only after six o’clock; two mugs—never more or less; always in the parlor and usually in the company of her friend and house guest, Frannie Steele. Frannie had lived at Sedgewick House for twelve years, and, like her host, was a childless widow. At the moment, she bustled in the kitchen, heating water and arranging a tea tray. Frannie had forsworn spirits after her husband died—he’d
been a drunkard—whereas Dorothy had been inspired by her husband’s tippling. Her fondest memory put Mr. Sedgewick back in this parlor, sipping as he snickered at witty passages from some book. Not too long after his death, Dorothy poured two mugs (one for him, one for her), adjourned to the parlor, and toasted him. After the first mug, she savored the second. Each night thereafter: “To Mr. Sedgewick, that he may find an ale drinker among the angels,” or, “To Mr. Sedgewick’s taste in women and in drink!”—and by this ritual the pain caused by his absence both sharpened and diminished. It was also about this time that her chin sprouted whiskers. The beard grew only an inch, but she had reached an age at which her body’s quirks no longer surprised. Perhaps the whiskers were connected to mourning or to ale; no matter: she still drank and grieved. In the last few years, the whiskers had turned gray and brittle, much like those Mr. Sedgewick wore at his death, and they comforted her.

  “Frannie believes in temperance, don’t you, Frannie?” She shouted this over her shoulder toward the sound of thick-soled shoes clumping in the hall.

  Then Frannie arrived, accompanied by two waddling cats—one black, the other orange and white—each fat enough to stuff a bushel basket. “Drink disagrees with so many people,” she said. “The bad seems to outweigh the good.”

  “If every disagreeable thing were to be prohibited, our legislators would pass a law silencing themselves. Such a bother these arguments about spirits. Jesus turned water into wine. Heaven’s bias is clear.”

  Elizabeth whispered, “I’ve not joined the temperance lot, but tea will do.”

  Dorothy and Frannie served in tandem, as people do who have shared harmony and years: Frannie placing the doilies and saucers, Dorothy arranging the blue china cups; Frannie offered molasses, Dorothy the spoon. Before their husbands died, the women had only a churchgoing awareness of each other, but after the deaths in quick succession of Mr. Sedgewick (Asiatic cholera, 1830) and Frannie’s Mr. Steele (riptide off an East Lyme beach, 1832; drunk), Dorothy opened her home to the widow whose intemperate husband had left little money and no property. “Just common sense,” Dorothy had told those townsfolk who praised her Christian charity. “She needs a home; my house has empty rooms.” Being Puritans, they admired her practicality even more.