The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

  THE STRANGE AND TRUE TALE OF

  HORACE WELLS

  SURGEON DENTIST

  THE STRANGE AND TRUE TALE OF

  HORACE WELLS

  SURGEON DENTIST

  a novel

  MICHAEL DOWNS

  Acre Books is made possible by the support of the Robert and Adele Schiff Foundation.

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael Downs

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First printing

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK.

  ISBN-10 (pbk) 1-946724-04-1 | ISBN-13 (pbk) 978-1-946724-04-5

  ISBN-10 (e-book) 1-946724-07-6 | ISBN-13 (e-book) 978-1-946724-07-6

  Designed by Barbara Neely Bourgoyne

  Cover art: Ca. 1850 tooth key made by Hermann Hernstein, New York City. Image courtesy of Alex Peck Medical Antiques.

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  The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist is a work of fiction. Some historic documents represented in this narrative have been copied from originals, sometimes edited for the purposes of the novel; others have been invented. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are not intended to be accurate depictions or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.

  FOR SHERI

  … and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither

  shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

  —THE REVELATION OF SAINT JOHN THE DIVINE 21:4

  CONTENTS

  Before and After

  Bellows Falls, Vermont

  Philadelphia, 1894

  I. Hartford

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  II. Boston

  12

  13

  14

  15

  III. Sedgewick House Hartford

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  IV. New England to New Covenant

  22

  23

  24

  V. Hartford and Boston

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  VI. Paris

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  VII. Hartford

  35

  36

  37

  VIII. Manhattan

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  BEFORE

  AND AFTER

  BELLOWS FALLS, VERMONT

  MARCH 1829

  On another of those melancholy nights, a doctor came to the sick man’s bedside and with the boy’s help turned the man onto his belly. The boy lifted the damp shirt and in the lamplight saw his father’s back, skin grayer than the sweat-dark sheets. Boils clustered, livid along the spine. The backbone cast shadows. From the mattress rose a sour smell, an expression of disease.

  “Bind the arms and legs to the posts,” the doctor said. He held a green-glass bottle by its neck, shaking the liquid inside to a froth.

  “He’s too weak to kick.”

  “Do as I say.”

  The boy cinched cords across the feverish skin of wrists and ankles, used knots his father had taught him. He had never before seen this naked back, a decent fear of God keeping his father always shirted—even behind the ox on the steamiest days. So he studied as he worked the knots, noting the back’s swell and sag at each fitful breath, how the shoulder blades looked sharp enough to cut earth, like a plowshare. He stared with a boy’s fascination for what’s fouled, observed with a son’s regard.

  “May I be excused?”

  The doctor said no and put forward an oak stick. “Lay hold, boy,” he said. “If he breaks it, don’t let him swallow the shards.”

  The boy climbed onto the bed. With two hands, he tested the stick, which was seasoned and did not bend. He placed it like a horse’s bit between his father’s teeth, then turned the head so it faced forward, bristled chin propped up by the pillow, a liquid gauze over the hazel-green eyes. What the boy saw in them recalled a nightmare from a few days past, a howling fiend come into his sleep with witches from the woods.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “We’ll be quick,” said the doctor, drawing gloves over his hands. On a bedside table he had set glass cups, handfuls of gathered lint, a matchbox, and a scalpel. He took the scalpel and cut quick dainty lines near each boil. Then he struck a match to the lint and dropped bits of it inside each cup. When the filaments glowed white, he pressed the hot mouths of the cups over the wounds. Skin hissed, and the body jerked. The boy twisted, too, away from the wounding as if the pain were his. Seared flesh stank in his nose, on his tongue. His father’s bite broke the stick, and at his scream the boy forgot the splinters, jammed a rag into the gaping mouth.

  Outside, in the valley, ash-colored clouds had settled for nearly a month, ever-present, low, choking sunlight. Below, a sloppy thaw, mud clinging to wagon wheels and trouser cuffs, and each day a gray-brown dankness. Since the clouds, Horace Wells, aged fourteen years and two months, had each night climbed the stairs to the room where his father lay, and murmured to his mother, “I’m here,” because as the oldest child the night watch fell to him. Mother never greeted him when he arrived, but would instruct. She might say, “We should move him closer to the window,” and Horace would answer, “The bed’s too heavy.” But they’d try and fail, and then his mother would say, “We should move …” and point elsewhere. After something in the room at last sat or hung in a new place, she left Horace alone to pass the dark and volatile hours. He’d wind the shelf clock, startle when black branches scraped the windowpanes, endure until morning his father retching into a pail, moaning that an icy wire burned through his groin, groaning in fitful sleep. Something awry lurked even in Father’s lucid moments. One night, he summoned Horace with a crooked finger, whispered, “Fluff my pillow,” but pillow fluffed, of a sudden shouted, “Away! Take the pillow away!”

  Years later, what Horace would remember, what he would dream: moonlight on his father’s hand as it clenched Horace’s wrist, how he seemed not to know what he held, his eyes on some apparition Horace couldn’t see, and how that sharp grip swelled Horace’s fingers with blood until it felt they might burst, how his skin purpled the next day. Shaking out the clammy sheets; how they never dried. The bloated, smooth-skinned spiders that took their leisure on the headboard, and which Horace smothered in a rag, afterward opening a window to shake out the broken-legg
ed remains. On a night after the doctor’s visit, Horace turned from the window toward his father’s whimper, saw his face screwed up, a keen light shining from his eyes. Behind Horace, a bat rushed in, chittering and squeaking, flying a crazy path. Horace crouched near the bed and waited for the bat to find its way back out. When the bat did not leave, he harassed it with a fireplace bellows, his father laughing softly, eyes closed. When Father’s teeth began to click-clack from the cold, Horace shut the window. The bat remained.

  His mother never noticed it, because it slept during the day, and because Horace respected her hysteria, he never said a word. The bat became a fearful secret he and his father shared. When it chattered and flew, and Father crooked his finger—“Horace, please”—Horace became afraid and crouched in a corner with a blanket pulled over his head. His warm breath stifled, and he drew his legs to his chest, pressed his hands to the sides of his face. He wanted to make himself small, but no matter how small he made himself, he never disappeared, not even when he clawed his own cheeks so it hurt. Many a time, Horace heaved open the window and hoped the bat would fly out and waited—though his father shivered from the inrush of winter, eyes tearing. The bat refused each invitation, beat its path across the ceiling, turns too quick to predict. Did its visit span weeks? Two or three nights? It seemed it had always been in the room, like the furniture.

  Then, on one of those countless nights, Horace understood why the bat stayed. He watched his father wince and flinch, saw his jerks and twists, how they matched the bat’s flight.

  Father’s pain, he thought.

  He closed the window. The bat squeezed behind the wardrobe, its high-pitched peeps and shrieks now more frightening. Soon after, the floorboards ticked with warmth, telling Horace that his mother had awakened and added wood to the kitchen stove below. It was morning, and in a few minutes she would spell him. He dabbed his father’s eyes, muttered a hymn of comfort: Praise ye Him, sun and moon: praise Him, all ye stars of light. The bat quieted.

  The night death at last blew past, it raised the window with its brittle hands and sucked air from the room. Horace gasped in a panic of asphyxiation, doubling over the bed and the withered body that lay there. A hazy purple light jerked from his father’s mouth, yanked toward the window as if pulled. But the light resisted that pull. It zigzagged across the ceiling as had the bat, erratic but ever closer to the window, and Horace knew that the light was his father’s soul. The bat flew, too, chasing the light as death reached for his father—and it seemed to Horace that death wanted him, too. His chest ached for air, his eyes dried and stung. He prayed please God please that the bat would chase the light right out that window. Please God please he prayed, and with the meat of his fist he rattled the headboard please God stop it as the bat shrieked, the light pulsed. His father only breathed, a rasp with each draw of life. Over and again, the prayers and the gusts toward the window, the frantic pursuit overhead—but at last an answer came to Horace. Or rather, an answer overcame him, changed him, silenced him.

  Of the change he had no awareness, and explaining to him would have been akin to explaining to the ice how it once had been water, to the charcoal how it once had been wood. If you had asked him his name, he would have answered rightly. Asked about the night the doctor visited, recommending glass cups and a bleeding, he would have recalled the foamy river where he rinsed away the blood. Yet he felt nothing of the boy choked by sobs at that river’s edge, who loved his father for teaching him how to tie knots. Of the sensations born from the soul, he felt nothing at all.

  At bedside, Horace stared at his father’s slack mouth, at his dilated and unseeing eyes. Pain is what’s left, he noted. Pain and breath. He studied the bat, the purple light.

  The feather pillow was flimsy in Horace’s hands, old and thin and cold with the sick man’s sweat. He leaned over his father’s face and with fists gripped the pillow at each end seam. A tiny quill punctured the fabric and pricked a finger. No matter. He gave all his weight and strength to the task, stretching the pillow so tightly across the face that the nose and chin stood out in relief. Though enfeebled, his father tried to jerk his head side to side. Horace felt the struggle in his trembling shoulders, in the clenched muscles of his legs. But these were not things to disturb him. He was ice, he was coal. He felt a peculiar, durable tranquility.

  The light did flash out the window; the bat followed. Air rushed into Horace’s lungs, a chill hammer that knocked him to his knees at the bedside, wracked by a cough, where his mother found him hours later, a pillow clutched against his body, a low and lasting noise issuing from his mouth that drew her to the floor beside him.

  “Was it peaceful?” she whispered, crushing him to her, and to Horace’s nod replied, “Lord be praised.”

  On the funeral morning, she gave him his father’s razor kit and told him to shave. “You’re old enough,” she said. “We must appear presentable before the grave.” He had watched his father use the blade but even so was clumsy with it, and standing before a cracked mirror at the wash basin, he nicked his chin so that the soap lather smeared pink.

  PHILADELPHIA, 1894

  Dentists had always shown him kindness—as they did now, more than two hundred strong, with their polite applause. Charles Thomas Wells had only stepped to the lectern, a glance toward then away from the blinding lights. Behind him, a heavy curtain smelled of dust. His host shook his hand, then departed, stage left. Charles Wells smiled and bowed, waited for his welcome to subside and for his eyes to adjust. He hoped his nausea might not worsen and cause an incident. Nerves. His host had offered laudanum as a suppressant, but Charles had declined. Family history gave him reason to avoid narcotic remedies. Instead, he sipped from a glass of cool water and imagined a cup of tea with honey and the hot bath that awaited him later in his hotel room.

  Crowded into the hall, those members of the American Dental Association had before them a stocky fellow of undistinguished height, five-and-a-half decades old, a minor executive with the Aetna Insurance Company, unassuming except for one extraordinary feature that quickly set some dentists to whisper. This feature was Charles Wells’s side whiskers, groomed so as to sweep away from the cheeks and grown so long that they followed the collarbone nearly to the shoulder. “An oriole might nest in those,” quipped a Baltimore dentist, seated in row M, to his fellow from Grand Rapids.

  The applause settled into a respectful and anticipatory silence. With lips pursed, Charles Wells belched quietly—a relief to the pressure in his belly. He removed a pince-nez from his vest pocket, and then a dentist’s tooth key, which he set on the lectern beside his scribbled pages. His talk, as titled in the association’s meeting program, was “The Courage to Face Pain: A Recollection of Horace Wells, by His Son, Charles.” Charles had written this speech mostly on the train ride from Hartford. He’d never before been asked to speak publicly of his father and his father’s work, and there’d been a time when the ambivalence he’d felt most of his life would have made such a task impossible. Time softens, though, and when Charles received the invitation to address this assembly, he saw an opportunity to redeem the uneasy love he felt for his father. Therefore, his nervous stomach.

  “Mr. President and gentlemen,” he began. “My heart is made grateful by the honor you do my father this week, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of his discovery. There is something of his spirit in this chamber, alive in the noble profession of dentistry and in all of you—its practitioners—so that I, an only child, feel your presence as brothers. Yet in addressing you I am at a disadvantage. Because my life’s occupation involves actuarial tables rather than tooth science, I have not any knowledge of exhilarating gases or the annulment of pain which might be added to your own. Thus I conclude that you have asked me here to speak about my father as a man. Here, too, though, my capacities are limited. I would like to say that I knew him well, but that would be untrue. My age was only five years and some months when he made the discovery you celebrate. His friends have told me stories an
d shared with me their memories, and I confess that I now and then confuse my own recollections with theirs. Was that me with him in a meadow, studying a nesting pair of Sylvia coronata? Or was it perhaps his friend Riggs, and I have simply considered the story so often it has become my own? Such is the power a father has over a son.”

  Those words: father, son—like an incantation. For a moment he lost his place in his talk, though he stared at the page before him. The words raised an old ache, at once a hunger and a disappointment, familiar to him since the days when grown-ups called him Charley. His father had called him Charley. How might it be, he wondered, were this ache like a tooth, easily plucked?

  His stomach. Its upset returned him to the present, brought a sheen of sweat to his forehead. He cleared his throat, swallowed, and raised his face to the crowd, straying from his prepared remarks. “My father’s favorite bird, by the way, was that same Sylvia coronata. The Yellow-Rumped Warbler. Of this I am certain.”

  And then he whistled a passable imitation of the bird’s song. The dentists chuckled, and Charles again found his place.

  “Here is a story that may help you understand my father. I heard this from his colleague, the aforementioned Dr. John Riggs, whom you will recall for his pioneering work in periodontal disease. The story takes place on an afternoon in the years before the discovery which accounts for my father’s fame. Dr. Riggs visited to ask about a new tool—a tooth key variation or some such; my father was always tinkering to improve his instruments—and he happened to arrive at the office coincidentally with a man named Wadsworth. If you know Hartford, Connecticut, where my father practiced and where I still live, you know that the name Wadsworth has since colonial times carried all the worthiest connotations. The two men chatted as they approached my father’s office door, and Mr. Wadsworth explained to Dr. Riggs that my father had recently performed a most difficult filling of his wife’s tooth. ‘Did something go amiss?’ asked Dr. Riggs, to which Mr. Wadsworth answered no, that the operation was performed with grace and all necessary speed to mitigate her suffering. To show his gratitude, he had brought my father a desktop curiosity he’d collected while in Europe—from France, actually—a statuette of St. Apollonia, whom Roman Catholics call the patron saint of dentistry. I myself never saw that sculpture, likely because my mother—a strict Congregationalist—would have been loath to keep a Catholic icon in her house.