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

  “We are not talking about you,” she said. “We are talking about Charley. So, now. Sledding?”

  Half a mile from the Wells’s house, Governor Ellsworth owned a dozen acres that included a logged slope, and when the snow lay deep—as it did now—it covered the stumps. Horace and Charley marched toward that place, over hard-packed roads and then off into the glare of icier stuff in a copse of birch trees. Horace led, breaking a path to make it easier for Charley, who pulled his sled by a rope. The father pointed out animal tracks as they walked, and he identified deer, hare, and muskrat, but the son made few comments about the tracks and found none on his own, even when he walked right through them. In the cold, the boy’s cheeks had reddened so completely Horace could hardly imagine them any other way. The sky seemed equally static—gray.

  “If a boy holds his privates in his fist at night, will that keep him from wetting his bed?” Charley asked.

  Horace thought maybe the boy had asked this same question of his mother, thus her insistence that they go sledding together.

  “I’ve heard that,” Horace said, “but there are other dangers to the practice. Best to use the chamber pot and relieve yourself properly.”

  “My line for the Christmas pageant at school is ‘No! I would rather see Jesus!’ and then I die.”

  “That’s high-minded.”

  When they noticed the steeple of the asylum for the deaf above the trees in the distance, Charley said, “I wonder if it is better to be deaf or blind.”

  “Maybe we should put wax in your ears for a day. Send you down Governor Ellsworth’s hill in a blindfold. Wouldn’t that help you decide?”

  “I want to know because I want to know which person to pity more. Who should get the most prayers? The deaf or the blind?”

  “Pray for all equally, Charley. We are each unfortunate until we arrive in heaven. Has your school teacher changed his views about tooth-brushing after lunch?”

  Charley changed his voice, made it squeak. “That’s a domestic lesson. Not a schoolhouse lesson.”

  “You erode your own dignity when you mock your teacher’s voice. It is important to respect him.”

  Charley hung his head, but Horace pointed to fox tracks, and the boy’s thrill of adventure returned. Later, at the top of the slope that was their destination, Horace turned his son by the shoulders and looked into his ruddy, smooth face, fresh as an October apple. He said, “Charley, listen to me. This is important. Brush your teeth after lunch regardless of what Mr. Reed says. Do so in secret if you must. Encourage your schoolmates likewise.”

  Charley fell off his sled on the first run, his mitten filling with snow, and though Horace turned the mitten inside out and beat it against his thigh, Charley continued to complain about his fingers being wet and cold.

  On the third run, a dog startled them when it charged barking from the wood toward Charley on his sled. White and grand, as if bred for some glacial European Alp, it wagged its tail, and when Charley tipped, the dog continued after the unpiloted sled as it crashed into an oak tree. The dog then coursed the slope with its nose to the snow, and father and son conferred as to whether Charley should tempt it with another run. When Horace said, “All right,” Charley launched himself, the dog galloping alongside, barking low and full as the echoing report of a rifle, again ignoring Charley when the boy tumbled. Soon the dog became as much part of Charley’s game as crashing, Charley calling, “Chase me! Chase me!” at the start of each run. The sled struck trees again and again until Horace, peeling slivers from where its rail had buckled, declared sledding to be at an end: “You enjoy the ride less than you do the fall.”

  As they trudged home, Charley said, “He always knows where we are,” and it was true, the dog stayed with them as they walked, sometimes nuzzling under their hands, more often ahead, anticipating their path. The animal had chestnut-brown eyes and a tar-black nose, and it carried its long-furred tail upright as a flag. Powerful, when deep in a drift, the dog kept its head high and pushed through. It was in just such a drift, near where they had earlier seen fox tracks, that they heard something like a tree branch crack. The dog yipped, then spasmed, then turned on itself to twist in the snow. Its bark lost force, became high pitched, quick, yelp after yelp. Charley stepped toward the dog, but Horace stretched out an arm and yelled “Back!” even as something in him leapt forward, a familiar urge toward pain. The cold air grew colder.

  Red stained the snow near the dog, which snapped its whole body, awkward convulsions that kept returning it to the same spot. The stain spread as if from the snow into the dog’s fur, its underbelly, and especially around the right foreleg. That was where the jaws of the trap had bit.

  Though his own blood pulsed powerfully in his temples, Horace worked to stay dispassionate in the face of the dog’s plight. He recalled his encounter with that eviscerated bird trapped in a bush outside his home, how he calmed himself to free it. But these fangs, these claws, threatened greater harm. Horace moved in a half circle about the animal, crouching, studying. The dog kept at its frantic leaping until the stubborn trap had peeled away skin, bunching it as a man’s shirt sleeve bunches above the elbow. The leg turned in an impossible way, bone broken, white tendons glistening. Yips became growls, and the growls became weary, and Horace noted that. Was it pain or surprise that caused the dog’s first cry, he wondered. Now its primary concern appeared to be captivity and not pain, panic trumping its physical suffering. That matched expectations. Panic was a kind of exhilaration, such as that brought on by the gas.

  Behind him he heard a whimper. His son, standing back as he’d been told but with eyes shut and his hands over his ears, his feet stamping at the snow. Would you rather be blind or deaf, Charley?

  He called, and when Charley reached his side, he turned the boy by the shoulders to face the dog, steadied Charley’s arms at his sides. “Do you see the problem?” he asked. “Look carefully. Do not guess. Speak with precision.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Not yet. With precision. Tell me.”

  “The dog is caught in a trap. The leg is hurt.”

  Horace unwrapped his scarf, unbuttoned his coat. “How do you know it is hurt?”

  Charley thought. “The blood. There is an awful lot of blood.” The dog turned a circle, snarled. It gnawed at the metal trap.

  “Blood indicates injury but not necessarily pain. Men gashed on the forehead sometimes feel next to nothing, though their faces be daubed with blood. So how can you tell the dog is hurt? What is different now than a few moments ago?”

  Charley thought some more. His fingers played with the hem of his coat. He said, “It forgot us.”

  “Utterly.”

  “We don’t matter.”

  “We don’t,” said Horace. “Even if we could make the hurt go away or make it worse, the dog is past caring. Its one concern is its own suffering.”

  Charley gasped, some sorrow greater than sobbing could describe. Horace whispered, “If it can remember we’re here, regain awareness despite its pain, it might let us help. We’ll wait.”

  He checked his pocket watch to count the minutes—he would make a note of them back home. The clouds remained leaden, and the gray allowed no shadows, though Horace still squinted against light flashing off the snow. He recalled a brighter morning from his Vermont boyhood, spent with his father placing wolf traps around the sheep meadow—his father’s bare hands big as a giant’s, knuckles pink against winter’s white, and how deeply they buried the chains. Could Horace yank this trap loose? Unlikely. The ground must be frozen fast, or the dog would have pulled it himself. Those long-ago wolves had—or chewed their way free—and now Horace pondered whether they’d overcome pain through will, or—because life depended on it—shut down their capacity to feel? Was that, somehow, related to what Charley noticed? In its suffering the dog had forgotten them, secluded itself in a desolate cave dug out of its own agony. Reverend Hawes often said that through sin we separate from God. But what about pai
n, Reverend Hawes? Have you noticed how pain separates us from all God’s creation? A hypothesis only, but consider Charley, who now wanders to lie curled against the rough base of an oak, hiding himself and his sympathy behind his broken sled. Consider the first pain of living, how it separates child from mother, and how other agonies and aches lead to separations. Blood from a vein, a tooth from its seat, heart from mind, thought from action.

  Horace from his father. And nearly from Elizabeth.

  Horace from himself.

  He thought of the Gospel, how in His anguish even Jesus felt alone, forsaken. Yet He never separated from His essential self. He forgave when He could have destroyed. Perhaps that was the miracle—wracked with human pain and capable of anything, all the violence He didn’t do.

  Twelve minutes, and the dog stopped working at the trap, settled itself in the snow, and looked Horace’s way. A beautiful animal, truly. Horace thought he could admire the dog a long time. He stuffed his gloves in his coat pockets and, in a crouch, offered a hand for the dog to smell. The dog sniffed at Horace’s knuckles, the black nose wet and nostrils flaring, white breath puffing, the ribs’ long cage swelling and shrinking. When Horace sat close enough, he reached with both hands and grasped the trap’s jaws. Blood made the grip slippery, and searching for a release mechanism (he remembered such a mechanism from boyhood), his fingers fumbled, his hand striking the dog’s shoulder, so the dog fell on him—teeth and claws and snarls. Horace’s throat shut, though he made a noise like a scream, and he raised his arms to cover face and neck, kicked his legs. He might have closed his eyes; he saw nothing. In a moment he had scrambled free of the dog’s reach, though it lunged until the trap’s chain stretched taut.

  Charley’s cries sounded louder, and Horace remembered in distant images as if through a spyglass how the day had started: a sled, the buckles on Charley’s boots, Elizabeth’s kisses as they’d left her behind, men off on an adventure. Now that cavernous bark had returned to the dog, and Horace—disoriented from sudden nausea and a weakness throughout his legs—staggered to where Charley hid, and then, letting the boy sit on the broken sled, he pulled Charley away from the deep of the darkening woods until they could no longer hear the dog, and then they were home.

  Levi Knowles, the tavern keeper, spread word among Hartford’s penniless sort that any person requiring a tooth pull ought to visit the surgeon dentist Horace Wells, office at Asylum and Main Streets, for an operation without pain or cost. They came, did the poor—tannery workers, their children, an old man with no hands, a blind vagrant, and a half-dozen delinquents, including a gaunt Irish boy of twelve or thirteen with pox scars, who arrived at Horace’s office that January day in 1845 already drunk on cheap applejack. Wisdom teeth.

  “I’d like to keep ’em,” the boy said, straightening up tall. “Drill holes in each. Make a bracelet. Wisdom’s precious, right?”

  Horace fingered under his own shirt collar, showed a charm Riggs had given him: the molar pulled while Horace slept the nitrous-oxide sleep, now fastened to a chain. “Wearing teeth is the newest fashion,” Horace told the boy. “Like a whaler’s tattoo.”

  With the help of his new clientele, Horace learned that the gas could erase the pain of tooth luxation in even the worst cases. An ox of a man, a drunkard heavy as three molasses barrels—if not four—came with a jaw so swollen he couldn’t take rum except with a dropper. A few breaths of nitrous oxide put him to sleep. A woman, mother to seven, brought a mouth so ruined her oldest daughter had to tell her tale; how, exhausted from factory work, the mother had drowsed while sitting on the eave of a second-floor window and fallen into the yard on her face. Interrupting the surgery now and then to give the woman another breath or three of the gas, Horace worked for fifty-seven minutes to remove three incisors and reposition others. Later that same day, a teenaged girl with a chipped tooth admitted that she had once picked Dr. Wells’s pocket on a night he’d visited Levi’s tavern; after surgery she woke confused, mumbling about a golden horse that nudged her with its soft nose and huffed and puffed at her ear.

  At first he approached each surgery as he always had, with locked jaw, expecting to change in that way he’d described to friends and Elizabeth the night of Colton’s exhibition, the way he’d changed so often since the night his father died (he turned his mind from that), to become not-Horace. But no change came. Now, as patients slept, he could cut a gum without any deadening of self. He could pat a shoulder in kindness, whisper an assurance. He gave his patients gifts: a hard candy, or a Bible verse printed on a slip of paper. He could look in a mouth and see it as he would any machine with broken parts—a plow on his father’s farm, or a meat grinder—something he could fix, and by fixing feel accomplishment and satisfaction. He remembered his patients’ names: Desmond, Cornelia, Albert. Malachi did indeed keep his wisdom teeth.

  With each surgery a foolish hope grew in Horace, one he knew to be grandiose and perhaps cloying yet one he prized, nevertheless, as Malachi prized wisdom. He dared not speak of it aloud even to Elizabeth, even to the caged songbirds in his office, for fear it would prove fleeting. Only on his knees, by candlelight and with folded hands, did he admit to a wish that it might be so. Could it? Could this discovery—the miracle of painlessness—prove a counterbalance against what suffering and injury he’d caused? Not just in his dental chair, not just pains he recalled, but also those he’d forgotten, those he’d visited on strangers and on loved ones, those accidental and those intended, from farm to city, from boyhood to today, as son and as husband, all the griefs, the heartaches, the quick or lasting agonies? If for generations to come his discovery erased humanity’s torment, might what pain he had inflicted be redeemed?

  Please, Lord. Let the uplift of your miracle exceed the weight of my sins, ease my burdens, and grant me peace. Through your Son, I pray.

  Amen.

  One January evening in 1845, when at last he’d convinced himself that nitrous oxide worked according to his theory, Horace sat at his desk, giddy with the exhilaration particular to success, and by the light of two candles he scratched out a letter to the person in Boston he knew best.

  Dear Will,

  Please recognize the URGENCY of the matter I will heretofore explain, and act with haste. I have discovered a process that makes pulling of teeth painless, and I wish to present this discovery in Boston. I do not write details here but I have learned that an Exhilarating Gas in precise doses renders the patient dead drunk deader than alcohol or laudanum. Fifteen operations under these conditions and every patient recovered and testified to having felt NO PAIN. Said operations have included simple extractions, exc. of collapsed roots, and shaving of spongy gums. All pain is erased as if by Divine Hand!

  In Hartford word has spread of my success, but this discovery must be tested and established in Boston for the same reasons that led you & I to test our previous discovery there Fair or not Boston is where medicine in New England most matters. Thus, in Boston I’ll make my case. Will you make arrangements for a presentation? I’ll require a volunteer with a troubled tooth, but also witnesses. A class of medical students, maybe? Perhaps you can engage Dr. Warren of Mass. Medical College in this effort? Imagine the license his approval would afford!

  Likely the principles of my discovery will apply also to Gen. Surgery. More about the gas when I see you.

  Assure interested parties of my resolve that this discovery provide for the general benefit of mankind. I have no expectation nor desire for pecuniary benefit.

  I am eager and I rush, thus the scrawl here that must pass for handwriting. Let us forgive one another and move forward. Good wishes to you. Regards to your Elizabeth.

  Wells

  II

  BOSTON

  On the morning her husband meant to leave for Boston, Elizabeth Wells lay awake in the silvery dark, listening to the neighbors’ cows lowing for their feed. When the cacophony grew loudest she knew Mr. Larkin had arrived on his hay wagon. Then the sounds of dumb hunger faded as the cows
ambled to the pasture’s farthest fence. Horace slept through it all, strangely enough, Horace for whom insomnia was a talent—and today of all days. On his side, facing away, he made a breathy gurgle that put Elizabeth in mind of Charley as a dreaming infant, and with that thought, something inside her tipped out of balance, something she wanted only her husband to make right. Moonlight fell on the back of his neck where his hair curled, and she watched him until watching him hurt. Then she rested the palm of her hand on his shoulder; his wool nightshirt itched her fingertips. She moved, let her fingers fall from morning’s darkness into that small strip of moonlight, let her knuckles brush his red curls.

  She breathed him in, and she wondered, is this what a great man smells like? Could this be a man history will remember?

  She shaped herself to the curl of his body until her breath crowded back on her from his neck, and she reached to touch his hip. She pictured in her mind a daughter with his reddish curls. She waited, and he didn’t stir. Her motions against him were at first so slight she might have been moving only within herself. But she grew bold. Eyes closed. Breath calm. Her own pulse loud. Pressing herself against his back, a slow rub, she dreamed him rising above her, imagined her hands on his bare chest, her legs opening to welcome him.

  Her body moved with such subtlety, he slept on, undisturbed.

  In the carriage of a crowded railcar on its clanking and coughing way from Hartford to Springfield, Massachusetts, a woman and a girl of about fourteen talked louder than anyone else, louder even than the train’s racket and the screeching baby in the woman’s lap. “What is your favorite word today?” the woman asked the girl. “Obviate!” came the reply, accompanied by definition and etymology, even as the woman shook a rattle at the infant, singing in a high-pitched voice, “Baby, baby.”