Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (34 page)

Originally, Wells planned an amputation for his presentation, but the patient never showed. A student volunteered to let Wells remove a nagging tooth, and what should have been a cinch for the seasoned dentist turned into a disaster. Perhaps nervous or distracted handling the nitrous oxide and prepping for the extraction simultaneously, Wells failed to provide a strong enough hit of gas, and when Wells plucked out the young man’s molar, he awoke with a start. Humiliated, Wells was practically hissed out the door, and he slunk back to Hartford the next morning broken in health and spirit. “The excitement of this adventure,” he remarked, “brought on an illness from which I did not recover for many months.”

Less than two years later another dentist, Dr. William Morton, asked Dr. John C. Warren if he could attempt a similar demonstration, and Warren reluctantly consented—but only on the condition that he (Warren) perform the actual operation after Morton had administered the gas. On October 16, 1846, Morton entered Mass General’s domed proscenium wheeling beside him a fragile, clinking contraption of tubes and glass globes that, he announced to the skeptical audience, would finally make all surgeries painless.

No one, it’s safe to assume, was rooting for Morton’s success more than Gilbert Abbott, the twenty-year-old human guinea pig about to have a walnut-sized growth excised from under his jaw. Morton held a rubber hose up to Abbott’s lips and instructed him to breathe in the fumes. Within moments, he was out cold.

As soon as Warren began cutting into Abbott, those in attendance fully expected the young patient to leap shrieking from his chair. But no, he continued to doze peacefully. After the tumor was removed and the incision stitched up, Abbott woke up as if nothing had happened. The once doubtful audience sat thunderstruck, then burst into cheers and applause.

Until that day, major medical advances had, with rare exception, originated overseas and migrated by way of scientific journals and word of mouth to the States. This time, Americans were at the forefront of a revolutionary development. The Brits had come close decades earlier but, inexplicably, dropped the ball. In 1799, English doctor Thomas Beddoes was utilizing nitrous oxide for medical purposes—but mostly to treat respiratory illnesses. Humphry Davy, a twenty-two-year-old chemist who worked with Beddoes, proposed in 1800 using the gas as a means of “destroying physical pain … during surgical operations,” but no one paid much attention to the idea, and Davy himself didn’t push it. Nitrous oxide was a notoriously temperamental substance, and dosages needed to be calibrated just right. Large quantities could easily kill a person, while smaller amounts offered only a fleeting high. Davy was well familiar with this, having developed an addiction to the
stuff. No laws prohibited using nitrous oxide for personal enjoyment, and Davy delighted in hosting for friends and acquaintances frequent “snorting parties.”

These had become something of a fad in Britain and then America, particularly among stressed-out college students. “I drank tea at Aunt Warren’s yesterday,” Anne Warren wrote to her mother from school on March 20, 1825. “Cousin Abby and Edward made some gass [
sic
] … and Cousin Edward [took] it all alone. It had but little effect upon him. It only made him laugh and walk about the room.” Anne Warren was Dr. John C. Warren’s niece.

On October 17, 1846, William Morton returned to Mass General and repeated his demonstration from the day before, this time on a female patient. Tabloids and scientific journals alike praised Morton for ridding mankind of an age-old terror, and he was inundated with congratulatory messages. “Everybody wants to have a hand in the great discovery,” read one flattering note from an eminent colleague who advised Morton to decide on a name for his “agent.” And this should be done expeditiously, since it was destined to
“be repeated by the tongues of every civilized race of mankind”
(emphasis in the original). The letter writer was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and he offered his own recommendation: “[It] should, I think, be called
anæsthesia
.”

Not everyone shared in the celebration. After learning of Morton’s “discovery,” Horace Wells became literally sick to his stomach, and he had reason to feel sucker punched. Years earlier, Wells had taken William Morton on as an apprentice, befriended the young man, and helped him establish a dental practice in Boston. And it was there, in January 1845, that he had told Morton and his associate, Dr. Charles Jackson, how gases such as nitrous oxide and ether could knock out patients long enough for a dentist to painlessly extract teeth or fill cavities, which, in the 1840s, were hollowed out using hand-cranked drills. Wells had already administered nitrous oxide more than a dozen times with auspicious results, and he believed its use could be expanded to other procedures. Upon hearing this, Morton became uncharacteristically quiet, apparently taking it all in.

Of the two, Morton was usually the effusive one, bustling with energy and ideas. Wells was reserved and sensitive, almost shy. Though four years older than Morton, he appeared more boyish, his soft, plump face framed incongruously by mutton chops. Morton attired himself extravagantly and exuded a charming, bon vivant air. Wells was a deeply religious man, dedicated to his faith and family. He was educated in the finest academies but was naïve. Morton, who had dropped out of high school to tend bar, was street-smart and able to manipulate friends, business partners, and romantic interests into believing whatever he wanted. At least for a while.

Wells remained in a funk that only worsened when he learned of Morton’s triumphant demonstration at Mass General. Adding insult to injury, Morton sent Wells a letter on October 19, 1846, wondering if he’d be interested in hawking, in exchange for a percentage of sales, Morton’s new compound, “Letheon,” a mixture of sulfuric ether and oil of orange (to mask ether’s offensive odor).

For Morton to treat Wells like a potential door-to-door salesman after stealing the idea from him was galling enough, but even more stunning to Wells was that Morton had obtained a patent for anesthesia. Traditionally, advances in the healing arts were freely shared for society’s benefit. Morton went further, demanding $100,000 in compensation from Congress after hearing that Army surgeons were using ether while operating on U.S. soldiers wounded in the Mexican-American War.

As Congress debated paying Morton, Morton’s former associate and now archenemy, Charles Jackson (the two had a falling-out over money), challenged Morton publicly. Jackson insisted that
he
had formulated Letheon.

From out of nowhere came yet another petitioner, Dr. Crawford Long, a Georgia pharmacist who presented credible but not absolute proof of having employed ether for medicinal purposes in March 1842. Long’s contention is possibly true, but he didn’t publish his findings until 1849 (five years after Wells had begun using it regularly), and whatever experiments he might have done in the spring of 1842 didn’t set in motion the widespread adoption of anesthesia.

Charles Jackson’s lawyers began a withering assault on William Morton’s personal character after discovering that in his youth he had left behind a trail of jilted fiancées and bilked creditors. Even before arriving in Hartford to study under Wells, Morton had been accused of counterfeiting, embezzling, forgery, and theft. He’d managed to stay ahead of the law, however, bouncing from one state to the next—Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Missouri, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts again, and eventually Connecticut—all by the age of twenty-four. Wells had known none of this when he accepted Morton as a student in 1844.

Exasperated by each party’s charges and countercharges, Congress dropped the matter entirely. Morton took to the courts and sued the New York Eye Infirmary for patent infringement, hoping to establish a legal precedent. Instead he only succeeded in confirming what most medical institutions already knew by then: Morton’s patent was worthless and should probably never have been granted in the first place. “It was only the extended use of a previously well-known principle,” the judge declared, ruling against Morton.

Wells, still distraught by Morton’s betrayal, floundered financially. He patented an improved shower bath and traveled throughout New England pitching his invention. When that sputtered out, he tried to launch a business that imported high-end reproductions of fine art.

On January 17, 1848, two days after his thirty-third birthday, Wells returned to his true calling and opened a dental office in New York City. His practice offered patients a bouquet of vapors to choose from: nitrous oxide, ether, and chloroform, the buzz du jour. Wells got hooked on the latter and swiftly descended into madness. “My brain is burning,” he wrote to his beloved Elizabeth in what would be his last letter home. “I am becoming a deranged man. My dear wife and child, if I am to live, I would be a maniac.”

By Friday, January 21, Wells was locked up in jail, having been arrested for wandering lower Manhattan’s streets in a stupor and hurling sulfuric acid at prostitutes. Racked with shame, the once devout family
man stuffed into his mouth a chloroform-soaked silk handkerchief, which he had snuck into his cell, and slashed the femoral artery in his left leg with a razor blade. Guards found Wells’s cold, bloodless body the following Monday.

After Wells’s death came the recognition and accolades that had so eluded him in life. Among other prestigious organizations, the American Dental Association and the American Medical Association judged Wells to be the true inventor of anesthesia. In 1875, Hartford erected a towering bronze statue of Wells in Bushnell Park with
HORACE WELLS / THE DISCOVERER OF ANESTHESIA
carved below. Wells’s grave marker in Hartford’s Cedar Hills Cemetery says the same.

As does William Morton’s headstone, which sits under a tall, fluted Greek column in Massachusetts’s famed Mount Auburn Cemetery:

Not to be outdone is Dr. Charles Jackson, who passed away twelve years after Morton and also rests in Mount Auburn. Jackson continues the dispute across the graves by concluding his long-winded epitaph with these words:

Dr. Crawford Long’s grave, in his native Georgia, alludes only to his faith, but residents from his birthplace in Jefferson rallied to honor their local hero with a statue that proclaims:

(Personally I think Gardner Colton, whose presentation at Union Hall inspired Horace Wells, deserves a similar tribute. At this point, why stop with four?)

A year after Horace Wells committed suicide, William Morton and Charles Jackson faced each other in one final feud. On March 21, 1850, Jackson was invited to provide his expert opinion in a highly publicized spectacle—the trial of Harvard professor John Webster, who had been accused of murdering Dr. George Parkman. After carefully reviewing the evidence, Jackson testified that the bone and teeth fragments unearthed in Webster’s stove were undoubtedly those of Parkman.

To rebut Jackson, defense attorneys called in their own heavyweight, William Morton. Whatever ambivalence his professional peers held about Morton’s personal character, he was still one of Boston’s most prominent dentists. On the stand he seemed to relish undercutting Jackson’s conclusions, pointing out that dissections frequently occurred in the medical school building and, thus, the remains found in Webster’s office could have belonged to any number of anatomical corpses. The teeth weren’t unique, either, Morton declared, and only an overactive imagination would think otherwise.

Persuasive though he was, jurors were more convinced by Jackson and another star witness, Dr. Nathan Keep, George Parkman’s personal dentist. In a dramatic courtroom moment, Keep produced a plaster mold of Parkman’s gums used to construct his dentures, and the recovered teeth fit inside perfectly.

Webster was found guilty and, despite offering a posttrial confession to lessen his punishment, sentenced to die. Webster’s trial was historic not because of his or George Parkman’s social standing, though that certainly spiced things up, but because Webster was the first American convicted of murder based on forensic science. In this case, odontological evidence.

After Webster was hanged on Boston Common on August 30, 1850, friends established a fund to support his grieving wife and their three children. The close-knit New England community proved generous and sympathetic, regardless of their feelings about Webster. One of the largest contributions was sent in by a local woman who, through tragic circumstances, had recently been widowed herself. The donor was Mrs. George Parkman.

WITH THIRTY-EIGHT
prisoners set to drop from the wooden platform simultaneously, there was some concern as to whether the scaffolding would hold. Initially, more than three hundred Dakota Sioux Indians were condemned to hang in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862, for their actions in the Dakota Uprising earlier that year, but upon reviewing each case personally, President Abraham Lincoln issued 263 pardons. What has brought me to Mankato isn’t just the execution of the thirty-eight men, it’s what happened to their bodies afterward, a grim fate that denotes a larger, more neglected chapter in the annals of medical history.