The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  Then Reverend Hawes began his sermon. A tall man with a melon belly, he spoke of the eternal’s rapid approach, of the need for thorough preparation. “We are the creatures of a day,” he told the congregation, “passing through life as an arrow through the air—spirits come from God and going to God.”

  At the Tombs, the frightened chaplain tried to lift the avenging sword, his homily meant to terrify with details of that fiery place worse than any jail. But he knew nothing about the Tombs, nor about any Hell into which his congregants had already fallen. Horace pressed knuckles into his brow, crushed his eyes shut. Chloroform had become such a Hell. This chapel, too. Wherever Charley and Elizabeth were not, that also was a Hell. He prayed for his family all the things a dying man must, though he no longer had faith that his pleas meant anything to God. To rely on the Almighty was also a Hell.

  At the precise instant Horace began a silent confession, Elizabeth clasped her hands to pray. She asked for strength to persevere without her husband, and also for strength to persevere should he return. Who could say which would be the greater trial? That morning, she had found Charley, in his church clothes, cross-legged on the floor and facing his father’s workshop door. Elizabeth hadn’t unlocked the room after Horace left, but here Charley sat. She wondered whether he expected his father to open it from the other side and step through. As if hearing her thoughts, he turned to her, and in his eyes she saw her own power, that sorcerous gaze that demanded truth. Without Father we are better off, those eyes told her, and I wish it weren’t so.

  When Elizabeth in the church pew reached for Charley’s hand, brought it to her lips for a kiss, at that exact moment Horace held a shaking fist to his mouth and bit his thumb until he tasted blood.

  He recalled Charley’s first tooth. The musical pitch of his infant squalling. The just-born’s perfect bruises, and Horace’s immediate love. But he could never forget how that small creature had nearly killed his own mother. Memory: Horace’s first vice. And Elizabeth, he loved her, though his love had proved too weak to endure her most violent pains. If the Lord granted him a chance to tell Charley anything, to give the boy a final wisdom, he would say that there is no greater love than to bear another’s suffering. He would confess that because he had not borne Elizabeth’s, in the end, he had multiplied it.

  Elizabeth yet loved her husband, and this no longer surprised her. She knew that love to be different than what she felt for Charley, different than the love she felt for God. That evening when she had turned her eyes against him and asked if he’d betrayed her, she did so believing that she loved God’s truth more than she did her husband, and in that way she would survive his answer. But she did not love truth more than she loved Horace. She’d never known until that night how she could suffer grief even in the smallest part of her smallest finger.

  After the service, Reverend Hawes greeted his flock one by one on the church steps, his face kind and doleful when he took Elizabeth’s hand, vague sympathies offered as though her husband had died. And at the Tombs, the chaplain stood at the door telling each prisoner, one at a time, to “fear the Lord’s wrath and mend thy ways.”

  Horace interrupted to ask, “Have you ever seen the soul leave the body? At death, does it depart through the mouth?”

  The chaplain looked startled. “No, I’ve never,” he said.

  “They didn’t instruct about this at seminary?”

  The chaplain shook his head. “God keeps some secrets,” he said.

  “Perhaps He’d reveal them,” said Horace, “if we paid better attention.”

  Returned to his cell, he sat on his cot—under which he’d concealed his razor and the bottle of chloroform. His Bible rested closed upon his thigh, his hand on its frayed leather cover. Of all the Elizabeths he could imagine, he brought forth the most tranquil to sit beside him. She hummed a tune so cheerful it made him sad, so she stopped, and he listened to her breathe, and kept her with him in that damp dark. Meanwhile, at Lord’s Hill, the true Elizabeth prepared barley soup for Charley’s lunch, and she felt the knife edge of her husband’s absence cut through her softest self. His workshop door stayed closed. Charley brushed his teeth without his father’s instruction. And never did anyone come from outside to get warm by the stove while whistling the song of the Sylvia coronata.

  POSTSCRIPT

  PARIS, January 12, 1848.

  MY DEAR WELLS :

  I have just returned from a meeting of the Paris Medical Society, where they have voted that to Horace Wells of Hartford, Conn., U.S.A., is due all the honor of having first discovered and successfully applied the use of vapors or gases whereby surgical operations could be performed without pain. They have done more, for they have elected you an honorary member of their society. This was the third meeting that the society had deliberated upon the subject. On the two previous occasions M. Courbet, the agent of Dr. Morton, was present, and endeavored to show that to his client was due the honor, but he completely failed. Though chloroform has supplanted nitrous oxide, the first person who discovered and performed surgical operations without pain was Horace Wells, and to the last day of time must suffering humanity bless his name.

  Your diploma and the vote of the Paris Medical Society shall be forwarded to you. In the interim you may use this letter as you please. Believe me ever truly yours,

  BREWSTER

  Acknowledgments

  This novel is fiction, not history, but I am indebted to historians whose detailed research sparked my imagination and helped shape this story. Readers interested in learning more about the historic Horace Wells and his world can consult The Life and Letters of Horace Wells: Discoverer of Anesthesia, edited by W. Harry Archer; Mad Yankees: The Hartford Retreat for the Insane and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry, by Lawrence B. Goodheart; and The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840, by Jack Larkin. In the Land of Pain by Alphone Daudet, translated by Julian Barnes, helped me understand nineteenth-century attitudes about suffering. Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science was especially helpful.

  Several institutions provided funding or time and space in support of this novel, including Towson University’s Academy of Scholars, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

  For historical advice and research assistance, many thanks to Dr. Scott Swank, DDS, of the Dr. Samuel Harris National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore; to the staff of the Connecticut Historical Society; and to Jennifer Miglus of the Hartford Medical Society Historical Library.

  For their advice through early drafts, I’m grateful to Geoffrey Becker, Jessica Anya Blau, Ron Tanner, and John Reimringer. Thanks also to Esmond Harmsworth of Aevitas Creative for his insight, good humor, and faith.

  Nicola Mason and Acre Books: Thank you for making my debut novel your own.

  About the Author

  Michael Downs’s books include The Greatest Show: Stories (LSU Press, 2012) and House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. Those books, along with The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, are set in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. A former newspaper reporter, Downs is an associate professor of English at Towson University. He lives and writes in Baltimore.

  Read more at Michael Downs’s site.

  About the Publisher

  Acre Books, the small press offshoot of The Cincinnati Review, aims to build on the excellence of its parent publication, bringing you volumes upon volumes of beautifully crafted fiction and poetry by new as well as established writers in the US and beyond.

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