Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (33 page)

For those of us born after the moon landing, it’s hard to comprehend fully how breathtaking the endeavor was. This was the pinnacle of human achievement, a merging of individual courage and technological genius unlike anything the world had ever seen. I myself hadn’t grasped its risk and significance until, while researching Goddard, I stumbled on one of the most important presidential speeches
never
given.

Unbeknownst to the public, White House speechwriter William
Safire had prepared a statement for President Richard Nixon to read in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin were unable to lift off from the moon and rejoin Michael Collins, orbiting above them, for the return trip to Earth. Since no rescue mission was planned (or possible) and their oxygen supply was limited, the two astronauts would have slowly suffocated to death.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” President Nixon would have told a grieving world in this chilling alternate scenario.

And this is exactly what they did, but, thankfully, without having lost their lives in the process. More than five hundred million men, women, and children (out of three billion people) across every continent watched the landing live on television that night, awestruck by what we—humanity—had achieved. Never before had the world been so united, so uplifted. Whether it ever will be again remains to be seen.

Sadly, two of the men most responsible for this moment were no longer alive to witness it themselves. President John F. Kennedy was killed two and a half years after he’d stood before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, and declared that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing
a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” On the morning of July 21, 1969, a note was found on Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery that read simply: “Mr. President. The Eagle has landed.”

There’s no account of any message being left at Robert Goddard’s final resting place 450 miles away in Worcester’s Hope Cemetery. But Goddard did receive a long-overdue public vindication the day after Apollo 11 sailed into space. Under the headline
A CORRECTION
, the
New York Times
ran a three-paragraph editorial that owned up to its January 1920 comments mocking Goddard’s intellect and belief that a rocket could reach the moon.

The paper amended its earlier criticisms and humbly concluded: “It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The
Times
regrets the error.”

FROM WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS
, the spot in downtown Boston where Dr. John Webster killed and dismembered Dr. George Parkman in 1849 isn’t exactly on the way to my next site in Hartford, Connecticut, and I promised myself to limit these side trips. But Parkman’s death is linked to my Hartford story about the invention of anesthesia, so it’s not entirely off topic. Plus, I’m already in Massachusetts, and I can knock this off lickety-split.

What most shocked Bostonians about Parkman’s murder wasn’t its barbarity but that both Webster, a distinguished Harvard professor, and Parkman, a respected physician and wealthy landowner, hailed from the gilded class. Hacking a former acquaintance to pieces just wasn’t done in polite society. And over money, no less. Webster had borrowed a substantial sum from Parkman and then became evasive whenever Parkman broached the subject of repayment. Fed up with constant excuses, Parkman marched up to Webster’s office in the Massachusetts Medical College (its name before becoming Harvard’s med school) on November 23 to collect the loan in full. He was never heard from again.

After Parkman’s frantic loved ones combed local neighborhoods, posted sizable rewards for information leading to his whereabouts, and convinced authorities to drag the Charles River for his body, a suspicious janitor chiseled into the brick-lined privy under Webster’s basement laboratory and, much to his horror, fished out a human pelvis, thigh, and lower leg. He summoned the police, who arrested Webster and searched his workplace from top to bottom. Inside a tea chest they uncovered a headless carved-out torso stuffed with another thigh, and at the bottom of a furnace they removed charred viscera, bones, and a jaw fragment with several teeth attached. Webster had so thoroughly mutilated the corpse that prosecutors had to call in renowned doctors and dentists to identify the remains.

Webster’s court case exploded into an international media event. The British were especially enthralled by the trial, and when Charles Dickens toured the United States in 1867, he purportedly told his Boston hosts that the first place he wanted to see was the room inside the medical college where Parkman met his grisly demise.

That building is gone now, but it would have been here at North Grove and Cambridge Streets, close to Massachusetts General Hospital. After parking in a short-term lot, I scout around and talk with security guards familiar with the area. As I suspected, there are no plaques or markers about the historic incident anywhere. There is, however, a slight nod to George Parkman, and it’s actually where I left my car. This is either an insensitive joke or a feeble tribute, but the one structure named after the murdered doctor on Mass General’s grounds is the Parkman Parking Garage.

Boston to Connecticut is an easy shot across the Mass Pike and down I-84. Heading into Hartford, I haven’t the slightest idea what my destination looks like now, only that it’s on the northwest corner of Pearl and Main Streets.

Like many major New England cities, downtown Hartford today is an architectural jumble, with gleaming skyscrapers towering over colonial churches and upscale shopping centers abutting seventeenth-century cemeteries. Upon driving to the corner where Union Hall used to be on Main, I find a humongous concrete-and-black-glass office complex with
BANK OF AMERICA
emblazoned on top. I park a few blocks away and then walk back to circle the building on foot. More than 165 years ago the spot was occupied by Union Hall, a three-story concert space that hosted choirs, symphonies, recitals, lectures, plays, and, on December 10, 1844, Gardner Colton’s “Laughing Gas!” exhibition.

Although potentially life-threatening to audience members, Colton’s show triggered a series of events that brought an end to one of humanity’s most feared torments: surgery without anesthesia, which—up until the mid-1800s—was how all operations were conducted. The prospect of having a tumor removed or a limb amputated was so terrifying that otherwise reasonable men and women chose to die slowly from whatever infection or cancer afflicted them rather than face the doctor’s scalpel or bone saw.

“When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves—I needed no injunctions not to
restrain my cries,” the English author Frances Burney wrote to her sister on September 30, 1811, to describe what a mastectomy felt like. While fully conscious.

That was only the exploratory part of her procedure. Next came slicing out the tumor. “I concluded the operation over—Oh no! presently the terrible cutting was renewed—& worse than ever,” Burney wrote. “I then felt the Knife tackling against the breast bone—scraping it! This performed, while I yet remained in utterly speechless torture.”

Burney was fortunate that she survived at all. If the crude, improvised butchery of early surgery didn’t kill patients right away, operating room infections often finished them off. Most physicians didn’t bother to clean their instruments or even wash their hands until the 1870s, when England’s Dr. Joseph Lister finally convinced the medical establishment that good hygiene and sanitation practices saved lives. Decades earlier, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—the esteemed poet and father of U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—had also suggested that certain diseases were contagious and advocated that doctors should sterilize their equipment, but his peers laughed off both ideas as ludicrous. (They were more impressed when he showed them a handy new device called a stethoscope, which, invented by Dr. René Laënnec in 1816, Holmes helped popularize in America.) An outspoken critic of his own profession, Holmes once remarked that if most of contemporary medicine “could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes.”

Numerous palliatives were attempted before anesthesia came along, all to little or no effect. Ice and tourniquets desensitized targeted areas
but could only be used on certain extremities, and the numbness wore off quickly. Adults and occasionally children were plied with laudanum, opium, liquor, and similar intoxicants, but each of these had potentially unpleasant side effects (for example, vomiting, seizures, death). Some doctors tried hypnotism, while others resorted to “bleeding to
deliquium animi
,” a technique that induced fainting through bloodletting. Both patients and doctors were eager to find a panacea, but one of the most obvious solutions hadn’t received serious attention until 1844.

On December 10 of that year, hundreds of Hartford residents streamed into Union Hall at 7:00
P.M.
to see Gardner Colton’s “one night only!” laughing-gas performance. Local press had raved about his previous exhibitions in other cities, and the turnout was excellent. “Mr. Colton gave the same entertainment last spring to an immense audience of ladies and gentlemen in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York—the papers stated that there were four thousand present,” the
Hartford Daily Courant
reported on December 9. “From the conversation we have had with Mr. C. and from the good reputation he brings among us, we have no doubt but he will meet a liberal support.” Un-mentioned in the article was that Colton, a thirty-year-old Vermont chair maker by trade, had recently dropped out of medical school after less than two years.

Colton took the event seriously, though, and began by discussing the chemical properties of nitrous oxide. He then invited audience members to inhale a whiff of gas for themselves. Among those in attendance was a local dentist named Horace Wells, who, to the embarrassment of his wife, dashed onstage without hesitation and proceeded to get high. Minutes later, Wells bumped into his friend Sam Cooley and noticed blood dripping down his trousers. Cooley had somehow smashed his knee after taking a few tokes of gas but, despite the injury, kept hopping about giddily, oblivious to the pain. Right at that moment, Wells realized that nitrous oxide could be the presurgical anodyne doctors had been looking for. Why anyone else in the audience, which included dentists and physicians, didn’t make the same
connection is a mystery. But no more so, I guess, than with every other innovation that seems obvious in hindsight.

After the performance, Wells approached Colton and asked him if he’d be willing to bring a bag of nitrous oxide to his office for a more formal experiment. Colton agreed, and the next morning they were joined by Dr. John Riggs, a former student of Wells’s and an accomplished dentist in his own right. Not wanting to risk anyone else’s health, Wells volunteered to have one of his own teeth extracted. After Wells inhaled the gas and conked out, Riggs clamped his forceps around a wisdom tooth and jerked it free, root and all. When Wells revived and his tongue instinctively probed the empty space, he exclaimed, “I didn’t feel it so much as the prick of a pin!” This was the first documented case of an American undergoing a medical procedure while anesthetized.

Wells began offering nitrous oxide to patients and taught other dentists, including his competitors, how it should be used. Demand was so great that he looked to expand his practice throughout New England. During a January 1845 visit to Massachusetts, he called on Dr. John C. Warren, the chief surgeon at Mass General and a member of Boston’s Brahmin elite. (Warren’s father had founded Harvard’s medical school, and his uncle had died a hero on Bunker Hill.) Wells requested permission from Warren to demonstrate nitrous oxide in front of an audience of students and doctors at the hospital, and Warren agreed.