The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  She swallowed the taffy, ran her tongue over her sticky teeth. She wanted to say painting and husband and waves, but the moment passed and instead she asked, “Has Morton discovered anything new?”

  “No,” he said. “No! It’s my discovery dressed in a more expensive suit.”

  He fell to his knees at the bedside, gazed into her face, then smiled with closed lips. He kissed the tip of her bandaged finger. He said, “I bought something for you.”

  She had wanted to be that woman in the painting, the one who anticipated, the one who waited and then received. But she saw the eagerness in his eyes, and she understood that in his way, he, too, had waited. With a finger, she traced the lines of his muttonchops, then his jaw, then his lips. A curled strand of his hair sat caught in his collar. She left it there. So she became the painter.

  He breathed the gas. Words rolled about the corridors of his brain, covered in fuzz and coming to rest in a room of pillows.

  “If you despise it,” he said, “you don’t understand it.”

  He thumbed tears from her cheeks. She couldn’t stop crying. “It hurt you,” she said.

  “Not the gas. People hurt me. The gas, the gas saves me. Will save me. You’ve never understood because you’ve never tried it.”

  She fed him a piece of candy. Salty and caramel, thick on his tongue. “It hurts me that you shun it,” he said. “If I were a painter—”

  She shook her head. “That’s not why I told you about the woman.”

  “If you despised my oils …”

  He held the bladder toward her, his offering, his plea. “You mustn’t despise it.”

  A white moth in the room flitted between them, and she waved it away, then touched Horace’s warm cheek. She wanted him not to hurt.

  The faucet in her mouth clicked against her teeth. Her tongue touched it, a coppery taste. She counted her breaths. One. Two. Her feet warmed as though she rested them near a fire.

  Three. Four.

  Her breathing sounded loud—ocean waves inside her head. That fiddled tune still waltzed through the window. Her eyes closed, she could hear how the room groaned, how it talked. Listen to the room, she said to Horace. The wood, you can hear its age. I can hear the blood pulse in your throat.

  Horace leaned her back into the bed. She heard the relief expressed by her buttons as they slipped from their buttonholes. Her skin singing to the air.

  “You must understand,” he whispered. “It’s as if Morton has stolen my child.”

  With eyes closed, with perfect vision, she saw her husband in the dark. Familiar, strange. How long since he’d lowered his body toward hers. The moth returned to land on his shoulder and just as quickly lit into the air. His shoulders, their freckles visible in candlelight. She counted them, onetwothreefour.

  When his fingertips touched her naked thigh, she flinched.

  This way, that way, which way you will…

  Their bodies pulsing, liquid and light.

  A holy burn between them. When she scraped his chest with her fingernails so hard she drew blood, he lifted from the bed, and all their confusions crushed into pleasure.

  The long silence broken.

  Late the next morning, Dr. and Mrs. Wells arrived at La Tête Blanc gallery. While Mrs. Wells sat on a red stool, her husband promenaded the room. At the end of his tour, he pirouetted on his right foot and clapped. He claimed the paintings to be the most moving things he’d ever seen, asked their prices, and laughed in such a way she believed that together the two of them could build castles in the sky.

  “Selling those,” he said to her as they walked to the train station, “we could make a fortune.”

  NEW SALVO LAUNCHED

  IN “ETHER WARS”

  AS CHEMIST APPEALS

  TO PARISIAN ACADEMY

  The Boston Post’s regular readers may well find themselves numbed to see the word “ether” yet again in our newspaper. Nevertheless, we feel obliged to report that Dr. Charles T. Jackson, chemist and graduate of the Harvard Medical School, has posted letters to the French Academy of Science and Medicine in Paris detailing his claim to the title “discoverer of painless surgery.” The letters are the latest development in a spat between Dr. Jackson and Dr. William T. G. Morton, the dentist who, in applying the gas he calls “Letheon” to surgical patients, has rid the scalpel of its horrors. Massachusetts General Hospital’s finest surgeons have since used Morton’s gas in several operations, successfully amputating limbs and removing tumors while patients sleep quietly through. Dr. Morton, however, has created a scandal in the medical community for refusing to disclose the nature of his Letheon. Dr. Jackson, in turn, claims Letheon is merely ether mixed with other elements to disguise its identity. He asserts that he provided Dr. Morton with the gas and instructions on how it might render a patient insensible to pain. To prove his case, he has sent letters and affidavits from some of Boston’s leading medical men to Paris via steamship.

  His is the second claim mounted against Dr. Morton’s priority with regard to painless surgery. This newspaper has published letters from a Hartford dentist who asserts that he first applied the principles now credited to Dr. Morton.

  Dr. Morton continues to argue his case in this and other newspapers and before the public’s representatives to the federal government. Much is at stake. The United States Army has proposed a contract by which the discoverer of painless surgery will receive recompense for his procedures and gases as used by the military in the war with Mexico. We at the Post have learned that this contract, when awarded, will make the discoverer of painless surgery a latter-day Midas.

  Elizabeth had decided that Horace needed a hat.

  “That’s the last thing we should buy,” he said. “I have half a dozen.”

  The door to the hatter’s shop proved stubborn on that December day, sticky snow clumping at the threshold, so she stood aside while Horace coughed clouds into the cold air, kicked the door at its low point, and shoved so the shop bell jangled. He allowed her to enter first, though she paused as she did to kiss his chin. Such public affection embarrassed him, she knew, but since Boston she could not help herself. She could not help much anymore, not when she felt the need for a good weeping, nor when she needed to laugh or sing, not when she pulled him to her in bed. Since Boston, all her best hopes had reawakened—and for reasons beyond the surprising settlement that gave Col. Roberts all rights to the shower-bath and put ten thousand dollars in the Wellses’ household accounts. “Soon, we’ll conceive a daughter,” she had whispered one night, her lips grazing Horace’s ear, “and by the time she is born you’ll have discovered how to make childbirth painless.” Then she closed her eyes as they touched and rolled and clenched and let go, until she cried out in that way, so like agony.

  At the hat shop, Horace shouldered the stubborn door closed. “To buy a hat I don’t need is a vanity,” he said. “Don’t you think vanity is the most appalling sin?”

  “Every sin appalls equally.” She shook the snow from her skirt and stamped her boots, then picked up a hat with a high crown and beaver fur for its shell and turned it over in her hands. “We are purchasing you a work uniform. How is it vain for a general to wear insignia? A man who intends to negotiate art sales in France must look the part. That you don’t want the hat proves the purchase isn’t vain.” She winked.

  “I’m uncomfortable in fancy clothes.”

  “Because we have never worn them.”

  She fitted the tall hat on his head as the hatmaker, Mr. Pounds, came from the back. Horace frowned, though Mr. Pounds agreed that Mrs. Wells had chosen a fine one.

  “Fine enough for Paris?” she asked.

  “My,” said Mr. Pounds, “will Dr. Wells wear my hat in Paris?”

  She turned Horace toward a mirror. He adjusted the brim forward, then to the side. The hat lengthened his face, dignified it. “Yes, Paris,” Horace said. “Mrs. Wells and I plan a new business venture. We’re to become importers of art. Can you imagine?” He chuckled a
s if the idea tickled him. “And while I’m abroad, I’ll see about presenting my science before the French academies. Others seek credit for painless surgery. You might have read that in the papers.”

  Mr. Pounds nodded. “All Hartford recognizes the injustice,” he said.

  Elizabeth lay fingertips on a second hat, then a third, as if petting them. “My husband does not need ribbons and certificates,” she said, “but we do care about truth.”

  “Did you know,” Horace asked, “that the dentist to the French king is a Connecticut man? From Norwich.” He handed the hat he’d tried to Mr. Pounds. “This one will do for all occasions, don’t you think? Respectable, but not stuffy?”

  “Scientists in Paris wear the most elegant hats,” said Mr. Pounds. “I have seen them sketched in magazines. Mrs. Wells is right that you want Hartford’s best.”

  “But only one,” said Horace.

  After they’d paid, Horace and Elizabeth stepped back into wind-swept winter, big splatters of snow smacking their cheeks. Twice he lifted her so she would not mess her boots in slush puddles.

  On what was to be their last night together for nearly three months, Elizabeth latched the bedroom door. In the sheets, she kissed his neck five times, welcomed his hands. He said, “You should come with me,” the words spoken as much out of love as concern. Since his return from New Covenant, he had practiced candor and worked to be a better husband, and to spread word of the nitrous oxide phenomenon as he was meant to do. His rewards were manifold: the money from Col. Roberts, yes, but especially this reawakened love. He wanted to stay home, yet he felt the necessity of Paris. He also wanted Paris—with good reason—yet felt the necessity of home. “Come with me,” he whispered again, because in Elizabeth’s grace he’d found a harbor where his soul could mend. Without her, he worried, it might break again. But Elizabeth had decided they could not afford the expense of two travelers, and someone needed to stay behind with Charley. “Take this with you in my place,” she said. She bit his ear, an impulse, something she’d never done before. She bit hard, surprised to find a small anger lingering for the years he had neglected her, and along with it a nascent foreboding that he would again. She bit with all her desire to keep him home, to mark him as her own. He cried out, squeezed her wrist, and pressed her to the mattress. They were cruel with each other that night in a way they had never been and could not even recognize in themselves, and that cruelty heightened the pleasure so that Elizabeth turned her face into a pillow to keep her cries from waking their boy. Come morning, husband and wife tried not to look at each other, as if still trying to understand what two strangers had met in their bed the night before.

  Two days after Christmas, Elizabeth finished writing her first letter to her husband, though she knew Horace still to be in transit aboard a steamship, bound for England and from there to a ferry across the channel to France. In the letter she wrote about the Christmas rejoicing and warned Horace to be wary when hiring an interpreter in Paris, because she had heard that interpreters especially cheat their American patrons. She mentioned newspaper articles about Morton and Jackson and what others were now calling the Ether Wars. She closed the letter with a mention that her eyes were tired or else she’d write more, then sealed the envelope and scribbled on the outside, “I wish I could get inside of this and come to you, don’t you?”

  VI

  PARIS

  Aboard the paddle-wheel ocean steamer RMS Hibernia, it fell to first mate Cyril Benson to fix any predicament involving passengers. The captain, whose aptitude for brutality had been honed over two decades in the Royal Navy, was accustomed to treating those aboard ship as cannon fodder, so while he directed the engineer and the helmsman and the shipwright, he left Mr. Benson to calm all storms involving what the captain called “the human freight.” Mr. Benson was particularly suited for the work. A Nantucket Quaker born with a fancy for whaling but not the courage, he had nevertheless a mariner’s talent with direction and orientation, including a sixth sense for circumnavigating the human heart. This talent explained how a Yank had worked his way to first mate on a Royal Mail ship. It also explained why women desired his company, though none would trust him; he understood them too well. Even those who slipped between the sheets in his berth stayed one night only. The ease with which they gave themselves to him—an ugly man, really, with a barnacle nose and a guppy’s mouth—revealed weaknesses in themselves that they did not wish to confront.

  He would have liked now and then to enjoy a stimulating conversation about the morals of Paris or the cuisine of England. But the well-mannered and educated passengers dined at the captain’s table. Mr. Benson ate with those who might slurp from a soup bowl or sing too loudly. Or he might miss dinner altogether, instead working below deck to convince some lunatic with scissors not to cut his clothes into strips, or listening to a matron mourn her drowned son’s unredeemed soul. Through years of such work, he believed, he had learned truths about human nature. Sympathy, for example, was to be avoided, because it too often smacked of condescension. Better to listen as if disinterested, as the ship’s engineer listened to the belching, groaning engine. All ailments could be discerned through sound. A whimper, a groan, a catch of breath. “Hold my hand,” a passenger might say. Or: “Cramps nail me to the bed.” Or: “Paddle yerself out my room and straight to Hell.” Mr. Benson accommodated requests as best he could.

  Moreover, he had learned that though all humanity suffer hardship and misfortune, there is no taxonomy of distress: no two people ever suffered in the same way, nor could much be gained from one person’s complaint that would help resolve the next. On the most recent crossing, a thief had stolen wigs from two women, leading the brunette to hysterical calls for amputation of the villain’s hands; the redhead just laughed. The captured thief tried to end his life with a plunge into the sea. To most people that seemed an overreaction, but not to Mr. Benson, who grasped that you could only call something an overreaction if you could predict a reaction. No one, he had decided, could ever foresee the behavior of God’s children. The infinite variety of human wretchedness was best met with equanimity and a willingness to be surprised.

  The captain of the Hibernia disliked surprises.

  Thus Cyril Benson found himself one dark early morning outside the door of No. 32, a shared cabin assigned to a surgeon dentist—Dr. Horace Wells of Hartford, Connecticut—and to the mayor of a small town in New Jersey who had that day demanded a transfer to new quarters. “I know I have bad teeth,” he told Mr. Benson, “but ‘Let me cut here, pull there, I have a vapor that numbs.’ The fanatic won’t let up!” This was in the final week of 1846, the Hibernia churning for Liverpool across the chill, rough North Atlantic. The sun had yet to rise this day, and after it did the cloud cover—thick as whale fat—would choke the light. In one gloved hand, Mr. Benson held a hurricane lamp with wick burning bright. In his other were keys through which he fumbled to find the fit for No. 32. His task was twofold: to retrieve the mayor’s belongings and to ascertain whether the dentist, as his cabinmate had claimed, was a danger to the ship. As Mr. Benson slid a key into the knob, a loose dog trotted toward him in the hall, a long-legged creature with draping cinnamon-colored fur and a narrow head, which swung to and fro. It paused to touch its nose to the seat of his trousers, then pranced on. He made a mental note to remind the Russian woman in No. 46 to leash her animal at all times.

  About to turn the key, he paused to press his ear to the door. Nothing. Brushed his knuckles on the wood in a sort of knock. Then gave it a sharp rap, and then a pounding with the meaty side of his fist.

  No answer.

  When he opened the door, the escaping sigh of warm air with its fetid smell reminded him of a room he’d too often visited in Liverpool, and though he’d promised himself never again to go, a familiar quickening of blood now unnerved him. His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he saw a man on the cabin’s lower berth, asleep belly down, face in a pillow. The man’s back rose and fell. Breathing. Thank heavens.<
br />
  Mr. Benson hung his lamp from a hook above the washbasin, then pushed aside a half-filled bowl of gruel and a beaver-fur top hat to make a place to sit on the room’s bench. The man, presumably the dentist, snored. The room was a scattered mess of beakers and bags and notebooks opened to indecipherable scribbles. Evidence that the dentist had been hard at some task, keeping odd hours, laboring to exhaustion. The sight made Mr. Benson uneasy. It put him again in mind of that Liverpool room: the back of an abandoned building, candlelight playing on the glass pipes, the stale sweat smell in the dusty pillow by the stove where he had laid his head. How he had dreamed opium dreams. How he woke empty of all things.

  The infinite variety of human wretchedness.

  But he did not smell opium here. He left the bench, drew near the sleeping dentist, palmed the man’s shoulder, shook it roughly, and said the man’s name.

  The dentist yanked his knees toward his chest, thrust forth a hand as if to ward off a threat, and cried out, “I won’t forget! I won’t forget!”

  “Forget what?” asked Mr. Benson. “Dr. Wells, you are aboard ship. What won’t you forget?”

  “I’ll have justice,” he said. His face was blotchy, pimples sprayed across the brow. His nose looked bloated, the hollows about his eyes darkened and shiny with sweat. The eyes themselves flitted, the eyelids ashudder. He waved at his indecipherable notes. “Others mustn’t pervert my discovery to their selfish ends.”

  Mr. Benson picked up a record book, tried to read the page as he settled back on the folding chair. “We’ve missed you at meals,” he said.

  The dentist nodded, took the book from Mr. Benson, tucked it shut under the blankets of the upper berth. “Who are you?”

  “Mr. Benson, first mate.”

  “What I just spoke,” the dentist said, “pay no heed. Tell no one what you’ve seen here.” He combed his hair with his fingers, but the strands stayed stubbornly scrambled. “I would not mind the passage,” he said, “if the boat would stop its swaying. All the back and forth. It’s unsettling.”