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:
Inventor and Revealer of Anaesthetic Inhalation
Born August 9, 1819
Died July 15, 1868
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:
Through his observations of the peculiar
effects of sulphuric ether
on the nerves of sensation
and his bold deduction
therefrom, the benign
discovery of painless surgery was made.
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:
In memory of
Doctor Crawford W. Long
the first discoverer of anesthesia
(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.
MINNESOTA RIVERBANK
Ruth Sprague,
d
au. of Gibson
& Elizabeth Sprague,
died Jan. 11, 1846 aged
9 years, 4 mos & 18 days.
She was stolen from the grave
by Roderick R. Clow & dissected
at Dr. P. M. Armstrong’s office
in Hoosick, New York, from which place
her mutilated remains were
obtained & deposited here.
Her body stolen by fiendish men,
Her bones anatomized,
Her soul, we trust, has risen to God,
Where few physicians rise.
—Epitaph on a gravestone in Maple Grove Cemetery, Hoosick Falls, New York
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.
Up until 1862 relations between Minnesota’s approximately seven thousand Dakota Indians and the U.S. government had been peaceful, albeit strained. Eleven years earlier tribal members had acquiesced to living on reservations in exchange for guaranteed payments from Washington. Many, however, chafed under federal authority and resented being wards of the state. Hostilities escalated in August 1862 when Congress, preoccupied with the Civil War, went months without paying its promised allotment. Starvation loomed, and some Dakota began hunting in “white” territory, aggravating tensions with local farmers. After a violent confrontation on August 17, the tribe’s warriors rampaged across the Minnesota River valley, torching barns and homes, slaughtering livestock, and killing hundreds of white settlers. Rounded up by U.S. soldiers and militia, the Dakota accused of committing the most egregious crimes were sentenced to die (whether they were actually guilty is another matter altogether), with the hanging scheduled for the day after Christmas.
An “air of cheerful unconcern marked all of them,” a St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter observed of the prisoners as they prepared themselves on the morning of their execution. They carried “little pocket mirrors and before they were bound, employed themselves in putting on the finishing touches of paint, and arranging their hair according to the Indian mode.” They marched to the gallows, heads high, and rushed the steps almost in “a race to see which would get up first.” As white cloths were draped over their faces, the men started singing.
“The tones seemed somewhat discordant, and yet there was a harmony to it,” the reporter continued.
Save the moment of cutting the rope, it was the most thrilling moment of the awful scene. And it was not their voices alone. Their bodies swayed to and fro, and their every limb seemed to be keeping time. The drop trembled and shook as if all were dancing. The most touching scene on the drop was their attempt to grasp each other’s hands, fettered as they were. They were very close to each other and many succeeded.… [An] old man reached out each side, but could not grasp a hand. His struggles were piteous, and affected many beholders.
The scaffolding didn’t break, but one rope did snap, sending a body crumpling to the ground. Soldiers rushed over to the shaken prisoner, gently helped him to his feet, and then returned him to the platform, where he was strung up for a second and final time.
Most died within seconds, but after ten minutes one man kept twitching and his raspy, labored breathing could be heard faintly under the white cloth. Finally a soldier tightened the noose with a hard jerk and the spasms stopped.
Declared “extinct” by Army doctors after half an hour, the thirty-eight bodies were cut down, piled onto mule-drawn wagons, taken down to the Minnesota River, and hastily buried in a sandbar. With the show over, Mankato began emptying out as most of the spectators drifted off. Most, but not all; lagging behind were a group of men, spades in hand, waiting for nightfall. Once the sun set, they hiked down to the riverbank, found the shallow graves, disinterred the corpses, and hauled the prized but cumbersome human loot back home.
“They even drew lots to determine who got the best cadavers,” Professor Bill Lass tells me as we pass Mankato’s public library, where the gallows had been erected. “Everyone wanted Cut Nose. He was six feet four inches and considered a magnificent specimen.”
Bill, now in his eighties, taught for forty-two years at Minnesota State University and is an expert on local history, particularly the Dakota.
Near the library is a statue called Winter Warrior depicting a gaunt, pensive Dakota, resting on one knee and gazing into the distance. Next to him is a bronze plaque that describes the December 26 hanging—the largest mass execution carried out by the government on American soil—but there’s no mention of its aftermath.
As we walk along Riverfront Street toward the Minnesota River, Bill points to a long patch of dark, wet sand below. “The river has changed since 1862, but the Dakotas were buried right around there.”
When I ask why in the sand, Bill says that, in late December, the ground anywhere else would have been frozen.
“Do you think I could walk on that?” I ask, unsure of how firm it is.
“I can’t tell from this distance.”
“Any interest in joining me?”
“I’ll wait up here,” Bill says.
Maneuvering cautiously down the steep riverbank and through thick brambles, I try to keep my balance without picking up too much speed. No use. Gravity takes over and my shuffle turns into a trot and then a full run. I hit the ground with a thud (yup, it’s solid) and regain my footing. Strewn along the sandbar are small piles of ash-white driftwood that look eerily like discarded bones.
The men who came to this same spot to steal the Dakotas were all respected citizens from Mankato and neighboring towns. Had they been caught—and authorities most likely knew and turned a blind eye to what they were up to—they would have justified their actions as benefiting the common good. They were all doctors in search of corpses for anatomical study, and as gruesome as their actions no doubt were, “body snatching” was common practice in America and had been for two hundred years. In other countries it had been going on much longer.
“A beautiful prostitute, taken by the students from a tomb in the church of San Antonio of Padua, was employed for the public dissection, the last one held by me in Padua,” Andreas Vesalius wrote in a 1546 letter. “Her body was slightly emaciated and therefore [ideal].” Vesalius is considered the father of modern anatomy and authored De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), a beautifully illustrated book that was unprecedented in depth and detail. Vesalius believed that nothing could replace that fingers-in-the-gristle experience of an actual dissection, and doctors throughout Europe and America were of a similar mind.
With the proliferation of medical schools in the 1800s, the demand for cadavers surged. Amputated legs and arms discarded by hospitals went only so far. Doctors wanted heads, necks, and torsos, preferably attached. The most committed and apparently least sentimental among them even rolled their own dead loved ones onto the dissecting slab. Dr. William Harvey, who mapped out the human circulatory system in the 1620s, famously took a scalpel to his sister and father after they died.
In 1744, Massachusetts enacted a law, the first of its kind in the colonies, allowing physicians to acquire corpses from county coroners—but only of men shot dead in duels or executed for having killed someone while dueling. Legislators weren’t so much interested in furthering scientific knowledge, however, as they were in adding a mark of shame to dueling, a tradition that increasing numbers of religious and political leaders deemed uncivilized. To be carted off after dying and cut up by a bunch of students was, to many, a great indignity, and this stigma made it all the mor
e difficult for medical schools to acquire bodies.
“No occurrences in the course of my life have given me more trouble and anxiety than the procuring of subjects for dissection,” one of America’s most distinguished nineteenth-century surgeons wrote while reflecting on his career. “Executed criminals were occasionally procured,” he continued,
and sometimes a pauper subject was obtained, averaging not more than two a year. While in college I began the business of getting subjects in 1796. Having understood that a man without relations was to be buried in the North Burying-Ground, I formed a party.… When my father came up in the morning to lecture, and found that I had been engaged in this scrape, he was very much alarmed, but when the body was uncovered, and he saw what a fine, healthy subject it was, he seemed to be as much pleased as I ever saw him. This body lasted the course through.
That doctor was John C. Warren, who had allowed both William Morton and Horace Wells to demonstrate anesthesia at Mass General and whose father had helped establish Harvard Medical School. Warren went on to recall his youthful adventures:
With the cooperation of my father, I opened a dissecting-room at 49 Marlborough Street [in Boston]. Here, by the aid of students, a large supply of bodies was obtained for some years, affording abundant means of dissection to physicians and students. In the meantime, however, schools began to be formed in other parts of New England, and students were sent to Boston to procure subjects. The exhumations were conducted in a careless way. Thus the suspicion of the police was excited; they were directed to employ all the preventive measures possible, and watches were set in the burying-grounds. Thus the procuring of bodies was very diminished, and we were obliged to resort to the most dangerous expedients, and, finally, to the city of New York, at great expense of money and great hazard of being discovered.
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 27