The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  A beautiful thing, what Morton had made. He could grant that to the man. The advantage, Horace found, was that Morton’s inhaler preserved the liquid longer, concentrated the vapors. Though designed for ether, it functioned with chloroform as well. A clear glass globe, brass fittings on the two extensions, one fashioned to fit gently between the lips. He opened the inhaler’s faucet and breathed the fumes. His toes tingled, his heart lightened. With his other hand, he squeezed the sponge the chemist had sent.

  “I don’t think it’s a funny joke, either,” he said, and then smiled. “Ether. I don’t ether. I chloro-form. I breathe and form a chloro-world.”

  He tried to form Elizabeth. Focus, he told himself. What is the hour? Might she be in bed? Outside feeding the horse? What horse? Newton is dead. He worked to envision Elizabeth’s hand over Charley’s to correct his penmanship in a school paragraph. But Charley wrote: Newton is dead. So Horace tried to seat Elizabeth in a chair in her aunt’s parlor, or lay her in bed shrugging aside a too-warm quilt, but his imagination was imprecise, weak; he failed to form her. Another breath, and some raw thing inside him contracted his rib cage; sharp gravel raked the bone. Elizabeth slipped from him, as did a sob, and he slid to his side, knees curled to his chest like an infant’s. My god, he cried, how can the vapor make it worse?

  Over his own low moan, his hearing grew precise as that of some blind night animal; perhaps it was the chloroform, or his own grief—he could not say. But he heard the crackle of the guttering wick. A man on the street calling, “Stewed oysters!” The key turning the bolt in the office door. The wheezing breath of a woman accompanying Cuthbert. The creak of lathing, the rustle when gray-white plaster dust fell through the spaces inside the walls. Her skirt’s whisper as she lifted it above her knees, the clicking of Cuthbert’s teeth, her pulse traveling the length of her neck.

  He had tried to form Elizabeth, but it was not her lying on the floor beside him. It was dead Maggie, shredded, like paper.

  “Horace! Horace! Damn you, wake up!”

  So dark. Candle burned out. The door crashing open, but still no light.

  “Horace! For God’s sake!”

  Pulling himself up, on all fours, a blanket tangled in his legs. That taste in his mouth. Blood?

  “The bitch! This is not how it’s supposed to work.”

  The flare of a hurricane lamp. The room returning in swatches of brown and charcoal. Cuthbert standing by the work table, lamp in hand. His voice rumbling in Horace’s head, as if Cuthbert shouted through water. “Vitriol? Do you have vitriol?”

  “Sulfuric acid, you mean?” Horace grunted—that ache in his neck. Rubbed an eye that didn’t want to open. “Yes,” he said. “In a vial. Somewhere.”

  “Would you look at this cloak?” Cuthbert beat the air with it. “She vomited all over it, all over me. And I mean to give her back worse. I want that acid.”

  Horace floated to the table, lifting vials and bottles, peering at labels. He handed one to Cuthbert. “What will you do with it?” he asked. He stumbled against the table, his legs unsure of their duties.

  Cuthbert uncorked the vial, pried a skinny nail from the wall and pushed the nail through the cork, lengthwise. Then he removed the nail and replaced the cork in the vial.

  “I’ll burn holes in her pretty things,” he said.

  He banged down the stairwell, and Horace looked out the window after him but through the murky glass saw only a puddled light here and there. If he were not so dizzy, not so fogged by the vapors, he might have followed Cuthbert to the street. He did not like Cuthbert, no, but he liked less being alone. Already he missed how Cuthbert’s rage had filled the soundless spaces in his head.

  Stripped to his shirt and in a fever-sweat, he soaked the chemist’s sponge in dirty water from the basin, squeezed it over his head. Shivering. Coughing. He tried the window, but it had been nailed shut. With the broom handle, he broke a pane, the tinkling fall of the shattered glass a comfort. Air and daylight rushed in carrying the smell of new snow and a coffee roastery, and a man’s shout: “Hard drops of white horehound candy! An aid for the consumptive!” Bells tolled; Horace counted but lost interest at three. Coughed and spit on the floor. Hours, days, nights. Why had time ever mattered?

  He opened a bottle, let chloroform pour into Morton’s magic globe.

  On his work table. The vial with a nail hole in its cork. When had Cuthbert returned it? Will it still be there, he wondered, when I’m awake?

  His room became the smallest of infinite spaces, time the briefest of eternities. When he dreamed he imagined himself awake. When he was awake, he believed himself to be in a dream. With his scraper, he clawed at the wallpaper, at pretty women in pretty gowns.

  A noise woke him, so he gathered himself and traded the darkness of the small room for the darkness of the office.

  The woman in bed with Cuthbert snickered. Not her from before. Another. So then, another night? Moonlight came through the window’s broken pane and touched the nakedness at the small of this woman’s back.

  “Wells, get to the other room or get out of the building! But get out.”

  A smell reminded him of bergamot, but over-sweet as if spoiled, an orchard of rotting fruit. Black flies eating and laying eggs. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and recalled the bed behind the pocket door in Paris.

  “Wells!”

  “They’re no lasting solace, Cuthbert. They comfort you, and then they ruin your cloak.” At the worktable, he lifted the vial of acid.

  But Cuthbert had him by the shoulders, rousting him into the hallway so that Horace banged his knee against a stair post, a bright jolt of pain. He shouted and gripped the railing to catch himself, but the momentum was too great. An ungainly descent, this scramble step to step, with Cuthbert’s profanity and the woman’s mocking howls trailing him as he careened down and down.

  “What’s the day?” Horace asked a woman on moonlit Broadway.

  “Friday,” she said, “for an hour more.” She had been strolling arm in arm with another woman, a friend. Their skirts and jackets fit loosely, revealed skin and shadows at their necks. Neither wore gloves or hats despite the cold. One with dark eyebrows and yellow hair. The other with freckles and a scabbed-over cut on her lip. The same height. In a tidy way, the women balanced each other. And he, Horace, without his counterweight, his Elizabeth, to steady him, reeled along a crumbling ledge.

  He had not yet finished scraping maidens from his office walls.

  “Which Friday?” he asked, blowing hot air on his raw fist. “What is the date?”

  She told him. This was the one with the cut lip. He would bite Elizabeth’s lip, draw her blood, because he loved her and she had sent him away. He needed to go back, to bite her lip and never let go. He said, “Today is my birthday.”

  “It’s my birthday, too!” said the other. She wore rabbit pelts sewn into the shoulders of her coat, frost dusting the fur. She placed a finger to the side of Horace’s head, traced a line down his cheek to his chin and to his smile. She touched his lip. The white puff of her breath was sweet with decay, her gums red. “We should celebrate!”

  “Conceived in springtime,” he said. “Born into winter.”

  “What do gypsies say about that?” asked the one with the cut lip.

  The other kissed his cheek.

  He snapped his head away. Her face showed surprise. Her pretty face. They all had pretty faces, didn’t they? Prettiness worsened the pain. He said, “Did you ruin Cuthbert’s cloak?”

  “Who?”

  A policeman walked through the yellow light of a streetlamp and drew near. The woman with the cut lip pointed at Horace’s head and shouted, “It’s his birthday!”

  “Happy birthday!” cried the officer.

  The ledge gave way, and Horace felt himself slip. Elizabeth?

  “It’s all ruin and decay,” he said.

  He flung acid, liquid fire to burn their cheeks. The women screamed. The one with yellow hair grabbed her
neck and fell, her head making a cracking noise as it struck the paving stones. The other crouched and covered her face with her hands. He stood over them, and he flung his vial, fiery rain spattering one’s cloak, the other’s hair. They gave back panicked cries, curled at his feet.

  The officer shouted—he was right there in Horace’s ear—and Horace felt himself rise. The blow skidded from one side of his head to the other. His neck jerked. His ears deafened. He slammed through rage into a fixed darkness.

  His crooked teeth had always been a pride and a shame to Erasmus Dwyer. Like gravestones settling in wet earth, tilted to and fro. Like the pilings of a sea-smashed pier, barnacles and seaweed and the like affixed to them. He’d never known another person with such awful teeth as his own, and he’d seen some frightful mouths in his years as a jailer at the Tombs. By necessity, he owned a tooth pick carved from whale bone, and he kept it looped on a string around his neck. Not long ago, he’d taken the offspring down Broadway to Mr. Barnum’s museum. Among the many curiosities, they’d seen the jaws of a shark, and the oldest girl started them all to calling it “Daddy.” Nobody crueler than your own kids. You’d eat them if you didn’t love them so.

  “Any youngsters?” he’d asked the new prisoner, whom he’d heard was a famous dentist. The dentist mentioned a son, then the conversation stalled, and Erasmus Dwyer understood there’d be no more talk about family. Instead, the dentist asked whether he might retrieve his Bible from his apartment. Comfort for the dark hour. A judge said yes, the dentist being famous and such, so long as a jailer accompanied.

  On the drive, Erasmus kept his mouth shut as was his habit. An advantage to prison work—no need to smile at his clientele. With straight teeth he might have been a banker. As it was, he gave prisoners a frown, not because he disliked them (though many he did), but because he didn’t want miscreants to mock his teeth. A jumble they might be, but no one else had the like—Erasmus Dwyer only. Which is why, as they climbed stairs to the dentist’s office, Erasmus began to wonder whether this fellow might take a professional interest. Even if the dentist had spent his career perfecting the teeth of Astors and Vanderbilts, wouldn’t he want to glimpse a mouth such as Dwyer’s?

  But having crossed the threshold, Dwyer understood his prisoner as not so high and mighty. Sordid, that apartment. Frigid as the snowy outdoors, mattress with soiled sheets, stink like a pigeon corpse in a chimney. The dentist shuffled about his cluttered work table. “My Bible’s somewhere,” he said. “Would you check that room?” Erasmus discovered only a spent candle, and when he returned to say so found the dentist staring out the broken window, face pale and screwed up as if with some distress, his whole self ashiver. Erasmus understood it was no time for a smile, and thus held to his frowning habit. By the end of his shift that Saturday he’d still not shown the dentist his teeth.

  His youngsters expressed no interest in news of their dad’s famous dentist. “Some potion,” he told them. “You never hurt.” It was the Sabbath, his day off the job, and he’d interrupted Bible study. But his children hadn’t yet known the suffering that makes a soul long for death, so the dentist’s potion only puzzled them. After dinner, he said to Mrs. Dwyer, “I think I’ll ask him to look at my chompers. He might want to make a casting, display them in his office. Do you suppose he’d pay me for the privilege?”

  Monday, Erasmus Dwyer woke feeling pleasant and hopeful, sensing Providence at work, God’s finger nudging the dentist toward Erasmus’s crooked mouth. At the Tombs, he picked his teeth in a looking glass, then lugged a bucket of fast-cooling gruel down the halls. The bars clanged as he knocked a wooden bowl against them.

  “Up and to the day, Dr. Wells. Come on.”

  The dentist lay on his cot, on his left side, facing the wall. His fists tucked under his head as a pillow. The blanket, though, bunched at his feet, told the tale. Because it was cold in January in the cell. A living man would want the warmth.

  In years to come, Erasmus Dwyer would recount again and again how he’d been the one to find the famous dentist, first to enter the cell, what prayer he offered, how blood had gone tacky. He’d present the key, which he’d kept. It was not bragging, what he’d say, though he worried it might sound so. Rather, he repeated the particulars as if picking at a scab. How he’d gathered the dentist’s Bible, his razor. The bottle with its potion. The small notebook in which the dentist had put his last words. What Erasmus read therein.

  Puddles form in the low spots on the floor of my cell. Water, after all, from a stone. A lime trail down the wall. My lungs ache.

  The jailers say “the dentist” and “Blackwell’s Island.” Thusly, they mark me as mad.

  The women told authorities that I had approached them previously on the street. Had I? If true, I fear what I wanted from them.

  It is not so quiet here. Footsteps heavy on metal grates. Water rushing through pipes overhead. And in the distance what I take to be guards beating a prisoner: a man grunts and others yell and then, in a quiet moment, the thud of a stick against flesh.

  Warren and those other academic mandarins of Boston? They make their reputations finding fault with others. They maintain their positions by scheming against the weak. But the weak understand better than anyone how the world must improve. The Warrens look down their beaks from lofty, comfortable aeries, but the distance is too great: their dull eyes can’t discern how the rest of us struggle.

  Let me ask you this, Dr. Warren. Were you strapped to the table, a tumor swelling your testicles, and I held the surgeon’s blade, would you turn down my humbug?

  Dwyer, my jailer. A kind fellow. I asked permission to retrieve my Bible from my rooms on Chamber Street, and he appealed to the presiding judge. We leave in an hour.

  In my prison cell I find, stuck by dampness to the wall, a downy feather—a seagull’s, I think. How did it get here? Dragged by a rat, perhaps. There’s a truth there.

  The secret Charley whispered as I sat at his bed’s edge that last night at Lord’s Hill, after I’d cocooned him snugly in his quilts:

  “I knew a long time ago. Even when you sleep here, you are always going away. But I didn’t tell.”

  When we left the Tombs, Dwyer did not shackle me. He let me ride the wagon bench as we drove. From the dark dankness of my cell into the bright day of New York City! Coal fire smoke and steaming hog manure, the stink of fish bones. Every breath chokes me.

  An inhalation expands the lungs. An exhalation contracts. Inhale, open. Exhale, close. An argument with oneself.

  My Bible, yes, of course, why we took the trip. But I lied like a tooth puller. I planned the razor all along.

  Cuthbert Bronk. Cyril Benson. Christopher S. Brewster. Curious.

  When you have given mankind such a gift as I have, you have the right to judge your time on earth a success and to depart by whatever means. So let no one judge me. Let no one condemn me or speak ill.

  A memory I’ve had several times since coming here, and each time it is recalled as a tremor through my whole body: the blue tint to my father’s lips; the softness of the pillow I pressed to his face. God’s inevitable work done, just a little sooner. We all felt better.

  The torn tag on my mattress. The wood button moldering in that puddle. The echo of a drip. Rats’ claws tick-ticking. Smells of mushrooms and mold. Strange how my senses remain hyperalert, as if the proximity of death is itself an exhilarant.

  I could say I am not in my right mind—but I no longer recognize my right mind. To contemplate as I do—throat or wrists? or femoral artery?—shows that my mind is in a morbid state. Not right.

  The inevitable corruptions. That phrase dogs me. I’ve shown how to destroy pain, but what shall come of it?

  Elizabeth

  Wasps high in the corner of this cell, chewing paper, building a place to rest.

  In the way things sometimes happen—and they do happen this way—at the moment Elizabeth Wells arrived for services at First Congregational that fourth Sunday of January 1848 (the day befor
e Erasmus Dwyer discovered her husband’s body), Horace himself shambled with a line of prisoners into the Tombs chapel. It was less coincidence than likelihood that each Sunday service would be held at the ten o’clock bell. In hamlets and cities from Bangor to Charleston, believers by the hundreds of thousands greeted a minister, prayed for a quick sermon and well-behaved children, feared divine retribution and anticipated grace—all in this same ten-o’clock-in-the-morning blink of God’s eye.

  In the Tombs, the chapel’s white-washed walls flaked with mildew, and the only light glowed from an oil lamp on the dusty tavern table that served as an altar. Against each wall stood a jailer armed with a pistol, and the prisoners—about two dozen—crowded shoulder to shoulder. The young chaplain was a presbyter, seven months out of seminary, and fearful. Time and again his voice broke, and twice he lost his place when reading. Horace, unshaven, his eyes sunken to dark, purplish caves, sat at the end of a pew with his Bible under his arm. His lower back ached from lying too long on the cot. To his left sat a fellow about his age, dark-haired and pointy-nosed, sour with liquor sweat, his fingernails long and yellow. Horace coughed several times, especially when he tried to sing hymns. Some prisoners, like the man with long fingernails, sang as if their zeal might make their innocence plain. Others kept silent. Horace sang because he sensed the chaplain’s weakness and wanted him not to be afraid. He sang because it was important now that he, Horace, be rigid and correct. Firm in all his actions.

  At First Congregational in Hartford, Elizabeth sat between Charley and Aunt Dorothy, reminding herself to hold her back straight. Even so, the emptiness at her center sometimes curled her forward. When Reverend Hawes began a prayer of thanks, Elizabeth reached for Aunt Dorothy’s hand, grateful for the money her aunt had spent on Charley’s school tuition and their tithes, for her glance that silenced gossips, for the fingertip brushed under Elizabeth’s chin to remind her of her own dignity. True, Elizabeth’s soul had fractured, but she knew Dorothy would help gather the shards.