The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  “This is a cheerful brew,” said Elizabeth.

  “Do you taste the rosehips?” said Frannie, scratching between the black cat’s ears.

  “Very nice, yes.”

  Dorothy stroked her beard. She was, in fact, a woman of prodigious charity—her own work at the insane asylum had marked the path Elizabeth later followed. But (and this she would not admit to anyone) her character also included a greed for the company of misfortune; woeful tales delighted her. At the asylum, she had heard stories to make marble statues weep, and she’d learned that to hear more she must not ask too many questions nor appear eager. Rude questions beget silences. But silences often beget the most miserable revelations.

  Alas, Frannie, bless her soul, was a chatterbox.

  “Just the other day,” she was saying, “I had a very interesting conversation with a neighborhood boy.” She poured again, gauzy steam rising. “He brings firewood, and we adore him—he stacks so soundly you’d think he were rebuilding the walls of Jericho. The other day, he says to me, ‘I’m dying, Miss Frannie.’ I ask, ‘Why might you worry so?’ And he shows me his teeth the way a dog would, and the teeth had all turned orange. I thought I’d like to ask your husband about that.”

  Dorothy lay a light hand on Frannie’s lap. It was enough; Frannie quieted.

  Elizabeth held her breath until the skin on her face flushed pink. “My Horace, as perhaps you have heard, cannot maintain his practice. He suffers from ill health.”

  Dorothy frowned her sympathy. With some effort, she lifted the orange-and-white cat to her lap. Elizabeth placed her teacup in its saucer and watched the cup.

  “Dr. Taft identified a problem with Horace’s lungs. There are other concerns, discernable to one who loves him, which are not likely noticed by acquaintances.”

  Dorothy had liked Horace from the day he came to woo Elizabeth at Sedgewick House, which offered a more charming parlor than that of Elizabeth’s parents, who used theirs mostly for Bible study. A quick mind, that young man, with an adorable blush.

  Elizabeth said, “These days, he is much concerned with birds.”

  “Birds?”

  “He practices whistles, keeps a dozen or so cages in the house, amasses stuffed examples of rare and local species, collects nests, and makes notations of bird habits. He is particularly fond of the Sylvia coronata.”

  “It is my favorite also,” whispered Frannie. She turned to Dorothy. “The yellow-rumped warbler.”

  “A bird of fine character,” said Dorothy. The orange-white cat began to knead her lap with its claws, so she shooed it. Elizabeth continued.

  “Dr. Taft says the pursuit of ornithology is in Horace’s best interest and that he should give up his dentistry. But birds do not pay him for his attention, and we cannot afford the cottage at Lord’s Hill without an income. We don’t want to sell the cottage either, as we believe Horace’s lung ailment to be temporary and that he’ll soon resume his practice. At the same time we cannot predict when he will recover his former self. We can let the cottage, but then where do we live? As you can see, we’re in a pickle.”

  Dorothy hoped that her face showed her concern, which was real. Still, she kept silent, and when she heard Frannie inhale as if to speak, she placed a careful hand again.

  The three women sat in the weighty silence. Elizabeth’s teacup pinged against its saucer as she set it down, picked it up, set it down again.

  “Something happened to Horace in Boston,” she said.

  Dorothy nodded.

  “But I don’t know what,” said Elizabeth. She looked at the women in turn, as if each might be able to tell her what ill fortune can fall upon a man in Boston. Her voice rose. She whiffled her hands about her ears as if to clear cobwebs. “I’ve asked him—dozens of times!”

  Dorothy sipped her ale and with a napkin dabbed her lips. She waited a moment, then three, until certain that Elizabeth had no more to say. Then she leaned forward and squeezed her hand. “Dear niece,” she said. “If you want an answer, you must never, never ask.”

  The Wells family moved from Lord’s Hill to the three-chimneyed Sedgewick House on a bright April day. Charley’s face showed his concern about the change, and Frannie kept him busy with twenty-three games of checkers, of which Charley won fourteen. All that day, Elizabeth’s eyes showed a whirling combination of fear and relief, as if she were glad for the new situation but concerned to nausea about what might happen next. And Horace? He was furtive, polite one moment and in the next wary as a beaten dog.

  Dorothy and Frannie had reorganized the attic, which had been home to objects that recalled their husbands—coats and cufflinks, property deeds and spittoons—and made room for Horace’s newest preoccupation. He carried his collections himself and let no one touch his cages or his array of tail feathers, nor the dissected and pickled larynxes of songbirds (which, he told Dorothy, illustrated their superior musculature against those of birds that croak or caw). Nor could anyone else place a hand on the mounted remains of a creature with a hawk’s wings growing from the shoulders of a large tabby. Horace had bought the cat-hawk from a ship’s cook, a man missing both eyeteeth. The cook described for Horace how he had shot the creature while hunting on an island off Egypt’s coast. These cat-hawks, said the cook, fly about seizing squirrels from high branches, then make nests of the tails. Horace did not believe squirrels lived on an island off Egypt’s shore but purchased the cat-hawk anyway and named it Warren.

  Only a week after the move into Sedgewick House did the sounds begin. From the attic, in the empty hours after midnight, came coughing and scraping that startled Frannie Steele out of teacup dreams, and which roused Aunt Dorothy so she covered her head with a pillow, and which gave Charley nightmares so that he fled crying to Elizabeth. She pulled him into the bed where her husband seemed never to sleep, and where she lay awake fretting over Boston and Clara Bliss and those who sang about her. Together mother and son comforted each other amid the nocturnal noises.

  April became May, and one afternoon Horace stepped into the parlor and interrupted Aunt Dorothy in the midst of a toast to Mr. Sedgewick. “Why are the hairbrushes in this house so clean?” he demanded. “Why is there no soot in the cook stove?”

  Dorothy did not know how to answer. When she did not reply, he said, calmly:

  “Answer me.”

  She said, “The stove contains soot, nephew. The brushes do indeed collect hair.”

  She could see in his face that the response made little sense to him, but rather than struggle with the riddle he announced that he would be in the attic, tending to his birds.

  Dorothy put aside her ale, then sought Elizabeth, whom she found in the cellar, putting up canned rhubarb and seeing her way by guttering candle flame. She wore an apron, and a smudge of sauce colored her cheek.

  “Are we in danger from your husband?” Dorothy asked.

  Elizabeth set down her tray of jars and smiled at her aunt, then shook her head to indicate all that she didn’t know. She lifted the candle’s tray and cupped the flame as if to find a place where there might be shelter from drafts.

  “His mind is lost,” said Dorothy.

  Placing the tray on a moldering ledge of foundation stone, Elizabeth looked from her aunt to the flickering flame, from the flame to her aunt, a twitch making her mouth ugly. Then she pinched the wick. In the space the darkness made, Dorothy heard Elizabeth gulp and choke. She gasped when her niece’s body nestled against her own, a sensation she hadn’t known since Elizabeth was a girl of nine or ten. Elizabeth pressed harder, head against Dorothy’s breast, hands grasping at her blouse, her body small as a child’s. Dorothy lifted her arms to girdle her niece, whose name she whispered as she would a prayer, holding fast out of fear that if she let go the girl would splinter into uncountable fragments.

  In Elizabeth’s nightmares, it was always cold on Colton’s stage, and Horace stood shoeless, his toes frost-blackened and curled, the whites of his eyes scratched red as if roughed with sandpaper. Wi
th trembling hand Elizabeth clutched his stockings, worn with holes. “Husband,” she said, “where are your shoes?” And he replied, “Are you my sister in Christ?” Her voice broke when she said, “I’m Elizabeth,” but he looked at her as if she were a carrion bird he was seeing for the first time.

  “What do you hear?” Horace asked.

  He sat with Dr. Taft in the kitchen, the two alone. Charley was at school and the women out helping to prepare the church for Holy Week services. Dr. Taft pressed the right side of his head to Horace’s shirtless chest. The physician hadn’t shaved, and his cheek stubble tickled Horace’s skin.

  “Quiet, please,” said Dr. Taft, a small man with thick-lensed spectacles and a jaw that disappeared into his neck. “Now: full breaths. Imagine your wife on your wedding night. That sort of breathing.”

  Horace asked Taft to repeat himself, but louder. What he did not tell Taft was that the blue-winter shrieks had remained in his lungs since Boston, and because of them he could not hear a mumbler such as the doctor. He wondered whether Taft heard the shrieks, too.

  As a child on his father’s farm, Horace had heard rabbits scream when torn by dogs. Now, if he concentrated, he could hear those same rabbits. Also, when he concentrated, he could identify among the shrieks those that had broken from Elizabeth when she gave birth to Charley. And those of Charley himself, fresh from the womb as he breathed his first breaths. But was it fair to call Charley’s cries shrieks? Those might be wails. The rabbits certainly screamed. Horace listened, and amid the shrieks he heard the Boston woman’s lament rise above the roar of the fire. Wails, screams, laments. When joined in his lungs as a chorus, they became a single everlasting shriek. Sometimes he took notes, a catalog of the sorrows he heard, because he theorized that the clamor contained a message he was meant to understand. Fated, perhaps, to hear. Something to do with breath? Because one night in the Sedgewick attic, he’d discovered that when he held his breath the pitch of the shrieks grew low, almost bearable. Take air into his lungs and the pitch rose. Empty his lungs and the pitch fell. As pitchforks fall into hay. As pitch black falls with night. Pitchpoled, ships sometimes are, stern over bow. When the ship is pitchpoled, sailors shriek.

  “When you cough into a handkerchief,” asked Dr. Taft, “what color is your sputum?”

  “Yellow. Now and then a thread of blood. Size and shape of a burned candlewick. What do you hear?”

  “I’m confounded. Given the blood, I’d expect the lungs to crackle, a sound like foil as it’s balled in a fist. But there’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Breathe steam twice a day from water boiled with herbs. I’ll leave a list of the herbs at Cooley’s apothecary. Do you smoke?”

  “No.”

  “Consider taking up a pipe. Tobacco excites the lungs.”

  “You heard nothing?”

  “What did you want me to hear, Horace? A circus band? It’s better that I hear nothing. When you hear noises from the lungs, that’s when there’s trouble.”

  The shrieking kept him from sleep. He trudged through the minutes of each night, nauseated with exhaustion—but as soon as head fell to pillow his thoughts sharpened, his senses hummed. Sometimes he curled himself into a ball and felt as if he should weep, but he had not the necessary vigor. Awake overlong, he filled notebooks. Maybe the shrieks were a trick of the brain, some reaction of memory in the pineal gland, as Descartes described. Perhaps they reflected his history of pain—suffered or caused—every tooth drilled, every violence done. Unabsolved and unredeemed, because he had failed with the gas. It followed, then, that he not hurt anyone ever again. Must not add a new voice.

  Ornithology helped. When he listed bird taxonomies, or examined under a microscope the facets of a cardinal’s eye, or even wiped canary turds from cages, he was not so bothered by the shrieks.

  But when he stopped.

  But when he listened to stories about Charley’s day at school.

  But when he prayed.

  But when on his way to the chamber pot he met that woman with a beard.

  Sometimes, studying birds, he held his breath. Delicious lung-quiet times. Bird claws and beaks (no breathing), their songs and nests and eggs, the gentle flap or the frenetic drive of wings, birds in water and birds on land and birds in sky, their nestlings, their dead eyes under the knife on his examination table (no breathing)—every happiness in birds.

  John Mankey Riggs, surgeon dentist

  43 Pearl Street

  Hartford, Connecticut

  June 12, 1845

  Dr. Morton—Dear Sir:

  Let me be blunt. Had you seen, as I did this night, Dr. Horace Wells, our esteemed mentor, you would see a stranger where you expected a familiar face. On behalf of his family, I ask you to send word of what happened to him in Boston. If we can understand, perhaps we can help. Otherwise, I fear the worst. We have had our differences, you & I, & I suppose a plea from me bears little weight with you. But as Wells has always spoken of you in good regard, please respond with haste for his sake.

  Since his return he has surrendered his practice & the family has no income. He has occupied himself with ornithology & in an effort to make money from what can best be described as a hobby, he scheduled a 3-night exhibition at Hartford’s city hall. This “panorama of nature,” he told me, would show that his engagement with birds was not “loafing,” that his understanding of avian life was no “humbug.”

  He constructed showcases & displays meant to educate ticket-buyers about the wonders of birds, & he hired a brass band to entertain. He visited a barber for haircut & shave & he dressed neatly but still seemed out of sorts that opening night. A handful of people bought tickets for the debut, myself included & some of his former patients, among their number a woman who brought a carrying coop with a pair of laying hens, & who sat in the first row. He remarked on her birds & thanked her for adding live domesticated fowl to the exhibition. That moment proved to be the night’s high point. Afterward he stuttered through lectures, losing himself in a thought & then arriving at a new idea unrelated to what preceded. Three times he was overcome by coughing, though he never left the room to recover—only stood & forgot his audience.

  I did not return the second night but heard he had dismissed the brass band. On the last night, Wells & Elizabeth waited alone in the hall, & I alone with them. When it was clear no one else would come, Wells rose from his seat, arms in slow mimicry of a bird’s wings against the air, turning himself softly amid the rows of empty chairs. “So elegant,” he said, “so stable in flight. How is it they never stumble in the sky?” I held Elizabeth’s hand as she quietly called him back to her side.

  Yesterday—two weeks since the panorama—Elizabeth sent a note asking me to visit at the address where they now keep house as guests of her aunt. “Urgent,” she wrote. I arrived that evening & the aunt met me, saying that Elizabeth was occupied with her son’s scripture lessons, though I think, perhaps, Elizabeth could not herself bear to show me what her husband has become. The aunt pointed me to the attic entrance, explaining that her nephew seemed neither to eat nor sleep, but at all hours secreted himself behind that upstairs door. “It’s like living with a ghost,” she said, “except one we love.”

  In the dark outside the attic, I stooped to scratch the ears of two giant cats, each yowling to be let in. From behind the door, bird calls sounded: some sweet but also a heron’s croak, a jay’s shriek. It was hot & damp in the stairwell & breathing proved difficult. I tapped the door, heard no response, so shooed the cats & opened it. Heat rushed out—I staggered backwards. A miasma engulfed me, an odor I can’t describe except to say it gagged me as a whiff of the tanneries sometimes can. I recovered myself in time to hear a loud beating & I jerked my head low as a pigeon winged past to perch in the stairwell rafters. It was then I saw: the attic seethed with birds! Jays & meadowlarks & grackles, crows & kingfishers. Some caged, some not. They cooed, cawed, cackled. An owl stared at me as if I presumed much by being there. At
the center of all, Wells sat at a table, his shirt stained yellow by sweat, and he used the unbuttoned cuffs to wipe his brow & neck. He did not mark my intrusion, occupied as he was with what appeared to be a dead carrier pigeon. He picked at it with forceps, in the midst of dissection, I think, exhaling & inhaling at odd intervals as if trying to hold his breath. Excrement lay everywhere, gray & green & black on the attic floor, on the table where he worked, dried along the back of his chair, even, it seemed to me, clotting in his hair. He was unshaven, a condition you’ll agree is alien to his nature. Blood was smeared across his forehead & I could not tell if it belonged to the dissected bird or to our friend himself. His eyes: raw, rimmed red. He chewed his top lip.

  “Wells,” I hissed, “what has happened to you?”

  He looked up from the corpse at his hands. I saw that he recognized me, but he studied me as if I were that dead pigeon prodded by his scalpel. He waved the blade in my direction. “You use the gas in your practice, don’t you, Riggs?” he said. “Your patients wake having escaped pain?”

  “I do use it, Wells,” I answered. “It works. As you proved it did.”

  “Did you bring any?”

  When I answered that I had not, he turned back to his dissection.

  “It’s all a humbug,” he said. “A humbug from womb to grave. Morton understands this & lives without cares. He moves through this world with the ease of an eagle on the wing. So I admire him. Next visit, Riggs, bring a bladder filled with gas.”

  For the love of God, Morton, can you tell us what will make him whole?

  John Mankey Riggs