The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Read online

  Those who inhale the Gas once are always anxious to inhale it the second time. There is not an exception to this rule.

  No language can describe the delightful sensation produced. Robert Southey (poet) once said that “the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this Gas.”

  Mr. COLTON will give a private entertainment to those Ladies who desire to inhale the Gas, TUESDAY between 12 and 1 o’clock, FREE. None but Ladies will be admitted. This is intended for those who desire to inhale the Gas, although others will be allowed to enter.

  Entertainment to commence at 7 o’clock. Tickets 25 cents—for sale at the principal Bookstores and at the Door.

  Elizabeth Wales Wells was a woman of twenty-six years that December day in 1844 when Mr. Gardner Q. Colton advertised an exhibition in Hartford having to do with the gas nitrous oxide. She was not a handsome woman, as her husband’s sister had noted once in a letter to Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, but she had grown pretty at least in that way women do who age beyond the glossy sameness of girlhood but have yet to either loosen or harden into matrons. Her cheeks held a febrile blush longer than most, comely on cold days, or when she laughed or wept. She liked to tell people that the feverish quality of her cheeks had first drawn her husband’s attention because of his concern with medicine. Some even believed her; she carried that sort of authority. She brought to marriage what she believed was skill in managing a household, and by and large she was capable of baking bread or pickling an egg, of instructing their son, Charley, in hymns and psalms and in basic arithmetic, of polishing pewter and brass, of sewing and mending, and of playing flute to accompany her husband on his accordion—their music made only in private. Though neither shared the belief of their minister, Dr. Hawes, that entertainment is sinful, they did understand glee to be a personal thing, and sharing it was an expression of their love. One spring morning of the sort that appeals to butterflies and budding trees, when even a practicing Calvinist could fool himself into believing that perfection on earth was attainable, Elizabeth and Horace took a basket to a meadow that edged a pond. Pregnant then, she welcomed his attentions, how he chose their picnic spot in a place that was soft but not damp, how he arranged pillows on their blanket just so. They ate bread with apple butter, read verse. Then, made drowsy and comfortable by the breeze and the trill of insects, Elizabeth napped. When she woke, she heard Horace laughing—or perhaps his laughter woke her—but he did not seem to realize she was awake, because she saw him striding about as if in leisurely flight along the pond’s edge. His arms he spread like wings, each lengthened by cut stalks of cattails he gripped in his hands, and with them he nudged the air. Sunlight flashed off mayflies that flittered near his shoulders. When at last he noticed her watching, he smiled and turned, a big gentle bird gliding in circles around her and the blanket. A soft whistle passed his lips, and at her applause, he launched up a nearby grassy slope. Turning and rising and rising and turning, he at last crested the hill, then dipped behind its horizon. In that moment she felt a satisfying shift at her center, a fuller love for him and his joy, something round and rich as the life in her belly. She gathered herself up, left behind their basket and blanket, and followed after.

  That morning of the laughing-gas entertainment promised by the newspaper advertisement, Elizabeth smudged shoe polish from its jar onto a cloth long blackened by such work. She wore white gloves already ruined, fingertips stiff with dried polish, and she lifted one of her husband’s shoes to the light. The work pleased her. Part of her pleasure stemmed from the sharp, acrid, and altogether appealing quality of the polish’s vapors. But she also appreciated how she could take a dirty, scuffed shoe and with a few wipes and brushstrokes make it new. Nearby, a stove burned oak, its vents adjusted for a slow burn. Across the kitchen, Horace, his jaw swollen from his bad tooth, read the Courant as he drank coffee. Her teacup was empty. She had never learned to sip tea, despite her mother’s instructions, especially when the brew was sweetened with honey and cream as hers had been this morning. Let others talk and sip and titter—as proper women ought—and wait for the tea to cool. Elizabeth gulped. But as a guard against gluttony, she limited herself to the one cup at morning and another in the afternoon.

  Near the stove, three bowls of dough were set to rise, damp cloths draped over each. Elizabeth sat close enough to smell the yeast, but also at a vantage from which she could see into the dining room. There, an Advent wreath decorated in tinsel sat at the center of the table, and underneath, in his favorite spot, Charley lay counting with numbered ivory blocks. From that same room, canaries in their cages sang, a linnet chirruping at interludes. Outside, dense clouds clogged the sky, and with such little sunlight Elizabeth worked on her husband’s shoes by oil lamp. He read the newspaper by the same.

  “These nitrous oxide parties,” he said, the words pronounced as if without a tongue. “They’re the rage among chemistry students at Yale. In Europe, too. We should go tonight. Riggs and Cooley will be there, I’m sure.”

  “Will you ask Riggs to look at your tooth?”

  “They say that people who inhale the gas begin to forget a bit of who they are.”

  “That’s a horrid thought.” Once more, she appraised the shoe, then, deciding the polish was sufficient, set it on brown paper on the floor. She began another. “Charley expects you to take him sledding. I told him he had to wait until you fixed your toothache. He asked me how a dentist can get a toothache. I told him being a minister doesn’t stop a man from committing adultery.”

  “You did not. Charley and I will be sledding by the weekend. I’ll not forget him. How did you really answer him about the dentist and the toothache?”

  “I told him you aren’t a practicing dentist, and your teeth are taking the opportunity to rebel.”

  Horace folded his newspaper in messy squares and grinned until she spoke again. She knew he loved her best when she presented herself as a gentle, teasing puzzle.

  “I told him cobblers’ children have no shoes,” she said. She flicked a speck of dried mud from the shoe’s sole and made note to sweep it later. Mud from the crude streets by the docks. Horace had been off again to Dutch Point the night prior. “Inquiry,” he’d told her. She’d chosen to believe him but still felt unsettled.

  Horace unfolded the Courant and resumed reading. His skin was clear and white, his hair neatly parted and straight until it splashed around his large ears in messy curls. Like a falls, she thought.

  “Someday I’d like you to take me to Niagara Falls,” she said.

  “Happily. Will you settle for the Union Hall tonight?”

  “Peg Trumbull has been to Niagara Falls. She reports that she saw God in the water. Got soaked, too.”

  But he was reading again. She rubbed polish into the shoe’s toe, then set it aside to dry. Charley called to her that he’d won his game, so she left her chair to look and clap for him, wondering as she did how she would ever tell this husband too distracted to hear her desires for a sightseeing holiday that she also wanted another child.

  Horace drove their carriage too fast for a dark night on a country lane, but just a whit too fast. Nothing breakneck, just at greater speed than propriety suggested. They were not late; he always drove as if driving were a waste of time, because in his mind only the destination mattered. Even as he dressed, he had wanted the night’s entertainment to have begun, and if racing to the Union Hall might make the show start faster, then let the mare be wary. Horace had wooed Elizabeth with the same urgency, following all the requirements of courtship but without the customary wait between stages. The kiss came early and not too much later the conversation with her father. And that same night, the public appearance at a Vespers service, Horace joining Elizabeth’s family in their pew. Each act in proper order, only a little faster than was seemly, suggesting that Horace broke rules but not too boldly. That combination allowed Elizabeth to feel safe with him and thrilled, too. True then, true now, as Newton hurried the proper-yet-daring dent
ist and his wife down dark Asylum Hill.

  They’d left Charley with a neighbor. With him away, and within the privacy of night, Elizabeth snuggled under her husband’s arm. The stars showed just enough light to remind them all of the road’s direction. The brittle cold tightened Elizabeth’s skin, forced tears from her eyes. She closed them and thought, He will return to dentistry. She knew him well enough to know that. In daily prayers she had asked that he recover the sensible part of himself. But at the same time, she did not want him to become a different Horace Wells, one hardened to the pain his practice inflicted on others, one who might not glide with cattail wings alongside a pond. During their courtship, it was just that mix of empathy and prudence that she found endearing. She remembered his letter proposing terms, which she’d read often enough to memorize.

  Elizabeth,

  Permit me to suggest the propriety of making my visits periodical, for the present. I would therefore propose to make you a one-half-hour call, on each Tuesday evening at 7½ o’clock.

  If this time would be inconvenient, I hope you will not fail to inform me. If I mistake not, the right-hand bell belongs to you. If I am mistaken, please inform me; the mistake itself would be a small one, but sometimes little things cast great shadows.

  Yours, Horace

  The first Tuesday evening he showed early for his appointed time (of course), but she let him wait as her aunt had advised. It was the second week of March, and a chill rain fell as if the sky itself felt bitter about winter’s long spell. When she at last came to him, he stood in the parlor waiting with a soldier’s attention. Water, she noticed, puddled around his feet on the floor. She gave him the full scrutiny of her eyes, for she had already learned their power to make people speak truly, and she said with all the seriousness she could muster, “Why are your shoes wet?”

  “In my haste, I splashed through puddles.”

  She smiled to let him know she approved of his answer but was not done toying with him, that his hopes were not guaranteed—but nor were they unwarranted. When she held out her hand for him to take, he did not misunderstand. His fingers felt cold in her palm, so she brought him a blanket, and he dried himself. As they made chitchat she found her way to a small couch with two cushions. She moved with care, but also as if he were not there with her (though she knew his eyes focused on her). He coughed twice, then crossed the room to her, wet shoes squeaking.

  They talked more, sitting so their shoulders leaned away, but soon she allowed her knee to brush his in a way he could not take to be accidental. Well, that ruffled him. When he smiled, she said, “You have pretty teeth.”

  Then, because she had prepared, she added, “Particularly your maxillary premolars.”

  Five months later, they wed.

  Outside the Union Hall, oil-burning sconces made an acrid smell and a dull light, and Elizabeth felt a twinge of anticipation for the day when the whole city shined as did Front Street, with its new gas-fired lamps. Gas. Gas was the future! In fact, there was Mr. Eaton saying so in his conversation with Mr. Brandywine, who inhaled a pinch of snuff, then wiped his fingers on his pants. Mrs. Morgan, in passing, complimented Elizabeth’s brooch. “A gift from my Aunt Dorothy,” said Elizabeth, and she in turn praised Mrs. Morgan’s silk tassel. Over there: the abolitionist crowd—and there the Jacksonian Democrats thundering on about Oregon and Texas and Polk’s recent victory, and there the Whigs, so restrained, and near them the bankers and factory owners who did not much care for abolition because of the sanctity of property rights. Horace led Elizabeth by the arm past them all to the scientists: Riggs, Horace’s first student and now in practice for himself; and Sam Cooley, the young drug clerk and relation of Abial A. Cooley, the apothecary with a shop on gas-lighted Front Street. The pair had already stopped that evening for a mug, and their manner suggested joviality. Cooley’s always-clownish grin spread so wide he gave the impression of a man who’d sell rotgut rum by calling it molasses punch. He seemed to be laughing at Riggs’s beard, which was cut in some new fashion and resembled a bib of wool taped to the man’s chin. By way of hello, Horace reached out and tugged.

  “My goodness, Wells,” answered Riggs. “Why that swelling at your jaw?”

  “I hoped you’d tell me. Do you have space tomorrow in your chair?”

  “Come by at ten.”

  Horace nodded. “Probably a pull. I might have let it go too long.” Elizabeth rose on her toes to kiss her husband’s scalp. “Horace has been busy.”

  “Birds on the brain?” asked Cooley.

  “Those. And pain.”

  “Poet!” Riggs poked Horace’s shoulder.

  Horace shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about Descartes, his theory that pain is experienced through the body and transferred to the mind or soul. As if the nervous system acts as a canal or road by which pain finds its way from the nick on your elbow to your brain. How, then, to interrupt that transfer? What dam? What roadblock?”

  “Build a toll gate,” said Riggs. “Charge pain a road tax it can’t afford.”

  “Isn’t Descartes the one who said, ‘I suffer, therefore I am?’ ” asked Cooley.

  Riggs chuckled. “If he were a dentist, he might have said, ‘I inflict pain and therefore I am.’ ”

  “When I inflict pain, I sometimes feel that I am not,” said Horace, his voice serious and low, his gaze focused away from the crowd and out into the dark street. “That’s always troubled me.”

  Elizabeth recalled something similar he’d said at the retreat for the insane, on that last day he had practiced dentistry, when he had pulled the mad girl’s tooth. She’d been too distracted then by the girl’s need and other matters to give it much attention. But now she tilted her head as if a new angle might better reveal her husband. “Feel that you are not Horace Wells,” she asked, “or not anyone at all?”

  “Just not.”

  “I suppose it is true,” said Cooley, pointing at Horace’s swollen jaw, “that suffering is evidence for existence.”

  “Now this is a silly discussion,” said Elizabeth. “Existence is self-evident. Pain no more proves it than any sensation. You men of science are poor philosophers.”

  Then the Union Hall doors opened wide, and a bellowing voice invited ticket holders to take seats. Inside the dimly lit hall, it was difficult to discern shadows from soot stains on the wallpaper. Ushers showed men to the front and ladies to the back. Elizabeth found Peg Trumbull, and together they chose seats near the center of a row so as not to be bothered by others coming and going. Elizabeth asked about Niagara Falls, and Peg began to tell how her littlest, Susannah, aged five, had failed to be impressed. “It’s just a bunch of water,” the girl had said, which made Elizabeth laugh and wish aloud for such a practical-minded daughter.

  “And when might we expect such a blessing?” asked Peg.

  The question stopped Elizabeth’s breath, and she chided herself for letting the conversation wander where it might. This matter of a daughter was none of Peg’s concern. The only answer would invite her into Elizabeth’s marriage bed—where a long habit of quiet guaranteed no children, a silence of bodies even Elizabeth did not understand. The thought of Peg prying further left her skin cold, brought the walls of the chamber close, made the air sticky.

  But then Gardner Q. Colton arrived onstage, and all attention turned toward this man of some thirty years, with forthright brow, robust mustache, and dark hair that swept back off his head to wave thickly at his collar. His face could have appeared on a dozen sculptures of heroic soldiers. From her distance Elizabeth could not tell for certain, but Colton appeared to have a single eyebrow that crossed the length of his forehead. She whispered to Peg, “Our chemist appears to have a bit of the werewolf in him.”

  “A bit? Or a bite?”

  “To wit.”

  As promised in the newspaper, eight young men of considerable bulk sat in the front row. None of these stalwarts was familiar, which surprised Elizabeth and reminded her that she was now, after all, wif
e and mother and not so often in the places young men might frequent.

  At the edge of the stage were portable stanchions tied together by rough ropes of the sort found in barns, separating Colton from his audience as if one needed protection from the other. Colton was explaining about the gas to be used. As in his advertisement, he quoted the British poet Southey, then spoke of how the potion was prepared. “En-two-oh,” he proclaimed in a voice dark and thick as creosote pitch. “Discovered in the earth, particularly where livestock evacuate themselves. Most commonly prepared in a laboratory by heating ammonium nitrate, which I myself have done, despite risk of explosion. Such danger can be mitigated by the application of certain phosphates at just the proper moments, and these phosphates have the added benefit of purifying the gas to improve its efficiency, making it wondrous as Gabriel’s own breath in the horn come the day of reckoning. I have prepared the gas for more than a dozen of these engagements, and to prove its safety and efficacy, I shall be the first to inhale.”

  Peg leaned near. “As names go,” she said, “Peg is always a suitable choice.”

  “Pardon?”

  “For a practical-minded daughter.”

  “There is no daughter,” Elizabeth said, and she smiled in a way she hoped would encourage Peg’s retreat from the subject.

  “From the moment a girl holds her first doll,” Peg said, “there is always a daughter.”

  Meanwhile, Colton paced the stage, describing his first encounters with nitrous oxide when, as a medical student in Manhattan, he found himself astonished by the transformations of people who inhaled the gas. The meek became bold, the bold sensitive, clumsy men danced jigs, and the quiet sang hymns to make angels weep. “It struck me,” he said, “that this magic, which is truly science, ought not be the purview of medical men alone but must be available for the benefit of all. This is an age, my friends, in which science ought to be our chief occupation. Through its mysteries we may one day descry all that Divine Providence has planned for His creation.”