Horace Wells and the Gas War

Dentist Horace Wells set up shop in Hartford in 1836, before the discovery of anasthesia. At an exhibition in 1844 he became certain that nitrous oxide could revolutionize medicine. He tried to demonstrate his findings... but things didn't go as planned.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blame a chuck reboarding and I'm faired out.
And it always surprised me when I was growing up
that going to the dentist was characterized as such a

(00:22):
dreaded event, until that is. I got my first cavity
a few years ago. I mean, I mean, you remember this,
like waking up and watching Saturday morning cartoons and it
seems like all the little kid characters hated going to
the dentist. I never got that. But then when I
got my first cavity, I was like, Okay, yeah, this sucks.
The drilling, the tugging. Even though you can't really feel
the pain while it's going on, it's still just so uncomfortable.

(00:45):
I actually haven't had a cavity yet. I mean, knock
on wood here, I don't want to tell you the
pat you're still yeah, it could happen, but yeah, I mean,
I I agree with your old perspective of going to
the dentist. Isn't that bad? Yeah? You get treats, you know,
you get flanty youthpaste or whatever. People are nice to you.
It's fine. So many of you, like me have probably

(01:05):
experienced some of those the darker side of dental procedures,
And I mean I didn't even experience the worst of it.
I can only imagine what having a tooth pulled would
be like. And in researching today's subject, I not only
had to imagine what that would be like, I had
to imagine what it would be like without the glorious
numbing effects of anesthesia. Because in the time we're going
back to, which is the early eighteen hundreds, anesthesia and

(01:28):
its applications and medical procedures had not been discovered yet
our subject. Horse Wells was one of the first to
realize that certain substances nitrous oxide in particular, which were
used at the time for recreation and entertainment, could actually
be applied to the medical arena, and the first he
was the first to really try to convince the medical
community of such. But things didn't really quite turn out

(01:51):
quite as he had hoped, and it led to a
bitter competition for notoriety with his contemporaries that his wife
dubbed the gas War. So we're gonna look at the
build up two and the fallout from the so called
gas war, as well as well as of tragic later
life that some people believe made him the inspiration for

(02:12):
Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Juckl and Mr. Hyde. Before we
get into well story, though, we need to point out
that Well he's often credited as the discoverer of anesthesia
in the lation anesthesia specifically, there were a lot of
people who played a part in this discovery. English chemist
and natural philosopher Joseph Priestly, for example, first discovered nitrous

(02:33):
oxide gas in seventeen seventy two. Later that century, British
scientists or Humphrey Davy started experimenting with it, and he
realized that inhaling it made him burst out into waves
of laughter, hence how it got to be known as
laughing gas. It also brought on a euphoric state. Michael Faraday,
Davy's associate, found in eighteen fifteen that ether produced similar effects.

(02:57):
So by eighteen or so Davy had lies that nitrous oxides,
promised as a painkiller, was really there and its potential
medical applications were there too, and he included those thoughts
in some of his writings. But for some reason, the
medical community didn't really do anything with this information at
the time, and instead, nitrous oxide and sometimes either too,

(03:21):
became a huge hit with the upper class, who would
throw these laughing gas parties where guests would use the
gas recreationally for those euphoric effects that Dablina just mentioned.
They would suck the gas out of balloons, and laughing
gas also became a form of entertainment for the masses.
To traveling shows would charge admission and allow volunteers to

(03:43):
try some of the gas out, and then the rest
of the audience would just watch this volunteer stumble around
and act all funny and weird. It could be that
because nitrous oxide was associated with this silliness that medical
the medical community didn't really take it seriously of the
sideshow act, and that might be one explanation for why
it wasn't used in medical applications at this time. Meanwhile,

(04:06):
surgeries and gental procedures, though like tooth extraction, continued to
be carried out without any anesthesia. Patients would sometimes get
a swig of alcohol or opium or man drake maybe,
but these weren't really great solutions because they often just
made patients even harder to handle, and if you gave
them too much, it could kill them. A good example,

(04:27):
if it's from a recent episode, would be poorled Mr
Bronte with his eye surgery, and how I just imagine
how horrific something like that would be without any kind
of sedative. Yeah. I also read an account in The
New Republic of a nineteenth century surgery and it mentioned
how a patient was having tongue cancer removed, and so,

(04:49):
you know, he had to be held down and restrained
because you know that you're completely aware of what's going on,
and you're completely you you want to get away, you know,
the surgeon just had to cut the tongue off as
quickly as possible, and then the guy sort of got away,
he got out of his restraints and it had to
be chased down so that they could cauterize the wound,
and ended up burning his lip in the process. And

(05:10):
it was kind of a mess um. And that's why
for surgeons, speed was really a virtue at the time.
It was hard to make a lot of advancements and
surgery though, because you were just trying to get things
done as quickly as possible. Escaped. So this was the
state of the medical community when Horse Wells came onto
the scene. He was born January twenty one, eighteen fifteen,

(05:32):
in Hartford, Vermont, into a well to do family. He
was descended from old school New England aristocrats. His grandfather
had even served in the American Revolution, and as wealthy
landowner as well as parents were able to give him
pretty much everything that he needed. While growing up. He
went to private schools in New Hampshire in Massachusetts, and
according to an article by Peter H. Jacobson and Anesthesia Progress,

(05:53):
Wells proved to be intelligent and inventive at a very
early age. So in eighteen thirty four, when Wells was
about nineteen years old, he started training as a dentist
in Boston by way of what was known then as
the prefector system. That basically meant that he learned by
being an apprentice to another dentist. We may have discussed
this in the McCullough interview a little bit, did um.

(06:15):
There weren't any dental schools at the time, and the
first one didn't open until eighteen forty in Baltimore, so
this was really the only way you could learn a
profession like this. In eighteen thirty six, Wells moved to Hartford, Connecticut,
and he opened a practice there which became really successful
really quickly. He was considered one of the best dennis
in town, and his patients included people like the governor

(06:38):
and his family, several other politicians, and some elite businessmen
as well. He married Elizabeth Wales in eighteen thirty eight
and they had one son in eighteen thirty nine. He
also had students who worked with him pretty early on,
even though he was a young dentist himself. Two of
these students were John M. Riggs and William T. G. Morton,

(06:58):
who become major characters later on in this story. Riggs
ended up practicing in Hartford, right near Wells, and Morton
moved on to practice in Boston. So at twenty three
years old, Wells wrote a small book called An Essay
on Teeth that talked about oral diseases and how to
treat them, as well as more general oral hygiene, tooth development,

(07:19):
preventative care, you know, sort of dental basics. And he
was really passionate about preventative dentistry and children's dentistry too.
I mean, I would imagine if you're seeing all these things,
you try to think of ways to avoid them. But
the main thing Wells did in his practice was unfortunately
extract teeth, and he was always really troubled by the
amount of pain his patients would have to go through

(07:41):
to have a tooth pulled. So he was always trying
to think of ways to help that situation make it
a little bit better. And as mentioned, he had a
very inventive mind. He invented and made his own instruments,
so it's not too surprising that this problem would eventually
set the wheels in his head turning. According to Jacobson's article,
in about eighteen forty, Wells told Hartford physician Linus P.

(08:04):
Brocket that he was quote deeply impressed with the idea
that some discovery would yet be made by which dental
and other operations might be performed without pain. But Wells
hadn't come up with any sort of solution himself yet,
when on December tenth, eighty four, he read in the
Hartford Current that there would be a laughing gas exhibition,

(08:24):
the kind of the kind that we mentioned a little earlier, right,
so it was going to be put on that evening
in the city by gardener Q. Colton. It was billed
as quote, a grand exhibition of the effects produced by
inhaling nitrous oxide exhilarating or laughing gas. And we I
have that Hartford Current article here a little piece from it,

(08:46):
and I just wanted to kind of read a little
description of this event and see you can decide if
you would have been enticed to buy it to come
to this. What it says after the introduction, where it
kind of says a grand exhibition of the effects produced
by inhaling nitrous ox side is forty gallons of gas
will be prepared and administered to all in the audience

(09:07):
who desire to inhale it. Twelve young men have volunteered
to inhale the gas. To commence the entertainment, Eight strong
men are engaged to occupy the front seats to protect
those under the influence of the gas from injuring themselves
or others. This course is adopted so that no apprehension
of danger may be entertained. Probably no one will attempt

(09:31):
to fight. The effect of the gas is to make
those who inhale it either laugh, sing, dance, speak, or fight,
and etcetera, etcetera. According to the leading trait of their character,
they seem to remain conscious enough not to say or
do that which they would have occasion to regret. Oh,
I would so be there totally. So Colton would travel

(09:54):
around to various cities putting on these shows. Most sources
say that he had been a med student one time
in that's how he got introduced to nitrous oxide in
the first place. So Wells did decide he had the
same opinion we did. He decided to go, and he
took his wife to the event that evening too, and
they witnessed what was probably pretty typical for one of
these exhibitions. According to an article by Henry Wood Irving,

(10:17):
probably a talk later printed in the Yale Journal of
Biology and Medicine, Colton started off by giving a brief
lecture about nitrous oxide and its properties, you know, a
little bit of science talk, and then he took the
first doves of the gas himself, something that he always did,
maybe to reassure the audience nothing too bad was going
to happen. The gas, he is, was contained in a

(10:39):
rubber bag, and he'd administer it through a kind of
wooden faucet. Irving actually compared it to what might be
used in country cider barrels. But after Coulton had exhibited
the effects of the gas for everybody to see, he
would invite up those volunteers onto the stage to get
their fixed. And one of the volunteers that evening um

(10:59):
the evening that Wells was there with a young drug
store clerk named Sam Cooley, who happened to be sitting
right near well What happened to Coolie when he took
the gas turned out to be particularly interesting. He of
course started behaving really erratically, and according to Irving, suddenly
zeroed in on an audience member, and this took him

(11:20):
for some imaginary enemy that he had made up in
his head. He was the eight strong, then exactly. Coolie
then jumped the ropes and started chasing the sky around
the exhibition hall. At one point he even leaped over
a sette after him, and then finally came to his senses. Eventually,
when Coolie sat back down, Wells noticed him sort of
rolled up his pant leg and reveal and injured and

(11:42):
bleeding wound. When Wells questioned him about it, Coolly said
that he hadn't noticed it happened at all. He had
felt no pain until the nitrous ox side wore off.
And then he sort of realized like, oh, that kind
of h yeah, what happened? And then he rolled up
his pant leg and saw it. That's when Wells had
his light bulb moment, realizeding what nitrous oxide could mean
for the dental and medical professions. According to Jacobson's article,

(12:06):
Wells approached Colton after the show and said, quote, why
cannot a man have a tooth extracted and not feel
it under the effects of the gas. Colton said he
didn't know, to which Wells replied, quote, well, I believe
it can be done. Of course, he still had to
put that theory to the test, but Wells didn't really
waste any time in doing that. He arranged for Colton

(12:27):
to meet him the next morning at his office with
some nitrous oxide, and he also told his colleague and
former student Riggs, who we mentioned earlier, about this idea
and recruited him to come help out with the procedure.
Finding a test subject wasn't really tough at all, because
Wells himself had a decaying wisdom tooth that was really

(12:47):
bothering him, and he proposed that he would inhale the
nitrous oxide and then have Riggs pull out the tooth.
So they all met up at Wells office next morning
as planned, the morning of December eleven four, Wells, Riggs, Coulton,
and this bag of gas. I mean, it sounds like
it's going to be a joke that after something. Coolly

(13:07):
was there too, since he was sort of the guy
who had set this whole thing off. And when will
sat down in the dental chair, he inhaled the nitrous
oxide from Colton's bag and then, according to Irving's article,
it was more than anybody had inhaled before, but not
quite enough to make him totally unconscious. He wanted to
really test this bury out. Once he was under the influence,

(13:30):
Riggs extracted the wisdom tooth, which he later said took
great force to extract. So it's not like he was
pulling any punches here. It's not like it was a
procedure right, And Wells didn't exhibit any discomfort at all
throughout the whole thing. He stayed pretty much doped up
for a little while after the procedure, but when he

(13:50):
finally came to Wells is said to have exclaimed, quote,
it is the greatest discovery ever made. I didn't feel
so much as the prick of a pin a new
era in tooth pulling. So after this, Rigs and Wells
to vote and most of their time to testing out
nitrous oxide on at least twelve to fifteen other patients,
and according to Jacobson's article, Wells also administered the gas

(14:14):
for too heart for doctors who used it during operations.
So the use of gas worked in all of these
trial cases, it seemed like it was really going to
be a great new innovation. Well said later that they
experimented with other gases too, including ether, but after consulting
with a local physician, he decided to stick with a
nitrous oxide because it was considered safer. After these additional tests,

(14:38):
so to speak, Wells decided that it was time to
share what he found with the medical community at large.
He later wrote quote on making this discovery, I was
so elated respecting it that I expended my money freely
and devoted my whole time for several weeks in order
to present it to those who were best qualified to
investigate and decide upon its merits. Not asking or expecting

(14:59):
anything for my services, well assured that it was a
valuable discovery. I was desirous that it should be as
free as the air we breathe. And that's important to
remember that he said that, because it kind of sets
him apart from some of the other people who claimed
this discovery life. Yes, so he looked into making a
presentation in Boston, which was the important hub in the

(15:22):
US at the time, the Medical Hub Medical Hub exactly.
In doing so, he reconnected with his old student and colleague, Morton,
who had been studying medicine, who had just begun studying
medicine at Harvard. So Wells told Morton about his discovery,
and Morton helped put him in contact with one of
his chemistry professors, a guy named Charles Jackson, who wasn't

(15:43):
really much help because he was so skeptical of this
whole thing. Then he put him in touch with Dr
John Collins Warren, who was a professor of surgery at
Massachusetts General Hospital. Warren was pretty skeptical too, but he
still agreed to let Wells demonstrate his method in front
of a room full of senior medical students. Which This
demonstration took place January, and Wells was supposed to administer

(16:07):
nitrous oxide to a patient who was scheduled to have
an amputation, but the surgery ended up being canceled, so
Wells instead proposed, well, let's do a tooth extraction, and
there was a student present who stepped up as a volunteer.
It's kind of hard to imagine now, a medical student
being like, you can work on me because I have
this tooth that needs to come out. But that's what happened.

(16:28):
He had a willing patient there, so Wells had the
student inhaled gas, and when he thought he was ready,
he started to extract the tooth. The students seemed okay
at first, but then he cried out at some point
during the extraction, and the whole thing was considered a
failure and called, quote a humbug affair. Wells was literally
booed off stage and he went back to Hartford just devastated.

(16:51):
Wells theorized later that he had taken away the gas
applied to early and that the student hadn't been completely
under its influence during the procedure, and that's why maybe
he felt something, though not as much as he would
have felt if he hadn't had anything. Interestingly, though, according
to an article by Stuart Finder in Anesthesia Progress, the
student later admitted that he didn't feel the tooth being pulled,

(17:14):
so he just cried out, maybe because something else, I
don't know. Regardless, though, Wells took the whole thing really
pretty hard, and he gave up his dental practice for
a while, and by spring of eighteen five he was
referring all of his patients to Rigs. He said his
experience in Boston brought on quote an illness from which
I did not recover from many months. He finally started

(17:37):
practicing dentistry again sporadically later in the year. He continued
to use nitrous oxide successfully during procedures. I mean interesting
that he's still so sure that it works, but he
takes it so hard. This fiasco and Boston. He did
other stuff too, though, and according to Jacobson's article, he
arranged a natural history exhibition in Hartford called Panorama of Nature,

(18:01):
and he also patented a new kind of shower bath.
In the meantime, though, others had begun to share Well's
interest in inhalation anesthesia, namely his old buddy Morton. In
eighty six, Morton announced his discovery of ether as an anesthetic,
saying that he tested it successfully on many patients, and

(18:22):
according to an article by U C. L A Professor F. A.
Carranza on the discovery of anesthesia. It was Morton's old mentor, Jackson,
who would actually suggested that Morton used ether in place
of nitrous oxide in his experiments. On October tenth of
that year, and Morton demonstrated his technique at Massachusetts General
Hospital during an operation in which Dr Warren removed a

(18:43):
tumor from a patient's neck. It was a scenario that
was very similar, of course, to the one Wells had
faced before, but it was considered a success and the
entire medical community was paying attention to what Morton was doing.
Still though, it almost immediately kicked off a controversy about
who deserved credit for the discovery of anesthesia, and Wells

(19:04):
wrote a calm collected letter to the Hartford Current in
December of eighteen forty six, basically outlining his previous experiments
with nitrous oxide, the events surrounding his visit to Boston,
and he also pointed out some of the things we've
already discussed, you know, why his demonstration didn't work, and
also the fact that he'd used either in the past,
but really preferred to work with nitrous oxide. You know

(19:26):
he hadn't been completely clueless about either, Yeah, because that
was one of the points that was probably being made
at the time, is that, oh, it was ether that
works and not nitrous oxide, and you were working with
the wrong thing. When he's like, well, actually, yeah, I
have worked with these other things too, but I just
decided this was the better way to go. But Wells
and Morton weren't the only ones competing for credit here.

(19:47):
Jackson also stepped up to the challenge since he had
suggested ether to Morton. He said the whole thing was
really his idea, even though, if you'll remember when Wills
wanted to do this demonstration, very scop tical of the
whole thing. Another doctor, one that we know the name
of well being living in Georgia, Dr Crawford Long of Georgia,

(20:08):
also came forward around this time, and he claimed that
he'd used ether during surgeries for anesthetic purposes as far
back as eighteen forty two, so a few years before,
a couple of years before Wells had started experiment. It's
Crawford Long's name that I've always heard connected to this
whole subject, So there you go. But Long, for whatever reason,

(20:28):
never demonstrated this to the public or communicated it to
the medical community until after Morton's success became public. So
all of this back and forth, all of this battle
and kicked off what Wells's wife later called the gas
War according to Jacobson's article, and Wells really made it
his mission after that to prove his claim to the discovery.

(20:52):
He traveled to Europe in late eighteen forty six, which,
as we've discussed in the past, was kind of the
center of medical innovation at the time. He gave some
demonstrations at medical institutions in Paris and petition the Academy
of Medicine and the French Academy of Sciences and the
Parisian Medical Society with his claim by February eighteen forty seven,

(21:12):
you know, really trying to get his name out there.
After that little European tour, he came back to the
United States and published a pamphlet called History of the
Discovery of the Application of Nitrous oxide, gas, ether and
other vapors to Surgical Operations, which also asserted that he
deserved the credit for the discovery of anesthesia. In the meantime,

(21:34):
Wells also started experimenting more with ether and chloroform as
farm as fantasthesia. He moved to New York City actually
in January eighteen forty eight, where he continued sporadically practicing
dentistry and administering anesthesia and experimenting on the side. Along
the way, though, he became addicted to the chloroform that
he was experimenting with, and on the evening of January

(21:56):
twenty one, eighteen forty eight, which was his thirty third birthday,
well under the influence of chloroform, Wells took some sulfuric
acid from his office and threw it on to prostitutes,
burning one of their necks. After this, he was jailed
into his prison. He was allowed to get a few
things from home though before getting locked up, and two

(22:16):
of the things he brought with him were some chloroform
and a razor. On January eight he inhaled some chloroform
while in his fell and then committed suicide by flashing
his left formoral artery. Twelve days or so before he died,
the Parisian Medical Society voted that he was quote do
all the honors of having first discovered and successfully applied

(22:40):
the youth of vapors or gases whereby surgical operations could
be performed without pain, so he got that recognition that
he was trying to get. It also gave him an
honorary m d. And made him an honorary member of
the Society. But of course Wells didn't learn about any
of this before his death, so it was a sad

(23:00):
end for a guy who was really passionate about his
career and about reducing patients pain. Ultimately that's what he wanted.
But it was that decline towards the end that some
say influenced the Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde story. So
I don't know if there are some literary buffs out
there who can make the connections and want to. I've
read the book, but I read it a long time ago,

(23:21):
so here, But I mean, I can see that connection
between self experimenting, which I know is the common thing
in the medical world at this time. But you're making
yourself into from somebody who's respectable and innovative into somebody
who is burning prostitutes with your gothic a little bit
of a monster. And he continued to receive honors even

(23:41):
after his death, though in eighteen sixty four. In eighteen
seventy respectively. The American Dental Association in the American Medical
Association both recognized Wells as the discoverer of anesthesia. Of course,
as we mentioned earlier in this podcast, this is still
sort of a debated point, since others such as Long
may have you used inhalation agents earlier than Wells did,

(24:03):
And as you mentioned, I mean, that's that's who you
think of when you think of the discovery of anesthesia.
For other people, it might be Morton. Um. So there
are a lot of people that could lay claim to this,
but as well as who really recognized the true potential
of what he found and sought to get the word
out about it with apparently no desire for profit. And

(24:23):
that's that point again that we come back to, because
Morton handled it differently. He did. I mean, Morton, on
the other hand, did appear to have personal gain in
mind when it came to anesthesia, and at first he
tried to keep the type of gas he was using secret.
He called it lethon and tried to disguise its scent.
He wanted to try to make it a patented gas

(24:45):
because of course everybody was interested in using it at
this point, but it eventually came out that it was
just ether you is something that anybody could get a
hold of, and hospitals and other institutions were allowed to
use it as they wished. It wasn't under any one
individual's control. And after that, Morton still tried to get
a pat and he tried to pass and he's like, Okay,

(25:06):
if I can't patent the gas itself, maybe I can
patent its method of use. He seemed determined to try
to make money off of this discovery, and even after
Well's death, Morton and Jackson continued their little gas war.
They continue to compete to be recognized as the true
discovery of anesthesia, and they both pursued one hundred thousand
dollar award for the honor from US Congress. Morton even

(25:28):
tried to bribe people like Rigs and even Well's widow
to lobby for him in this respect, but ultimately neither
I've ever got the cash. Sounds like it got pretty
pretty dirty at the end there, so Well the supporters
continued to defend him, and if there was truly a
winner in the gas war, I mean, it sounds like
just a lot of tragedy came out of it. If

(25:51):
there was a winner. It was probably just society at large.
You know that you wouldn't have to get your eye
surgery like Mr Bronte, or get your wisdom to pyanked
out without something doubling the pain. Yeah, going to the
dentist could be a pleasure for people everywhere rather than
just something that you dread. And the use of anesthesia

(26:11):
was of course adopted all over the world, although there
was some resistance to this along the way. Today we
know that there are many different types of anesthesia that
have allowed for all sorts of medical innovations and um.
And so you know, no matter who we can give
total credit to for u discovering anesthesia, probably all of

(26:33):
these people. Um, there's no doubt that it did good.
And I feel like there's one more person we have
to mention outside of this gaff Forlors fiasco. But Queen
Victoria helped really popularize the use of anesthesia because she
used it, I think and maybe her last or maybe
even her last two pregnancies or her childbirth, and it

(26:55):
helped send the message that this was something okay, it
was safe. If the Queen was using it, you're good
to go to. Yeah. Also from a moral standpoint. I
think one of the the reasons people were opposed to
using it is because a lot of religious institutions, for example,
thought that you were supposed to, especially during childbirth, you're
supposed to feel that pain. And her using it in

(27:18):
childbirth for one of her children, I think just sort
of made it, Like you said, it made it a
little better, made it okay for more people. And of
course we couldn't get out without making a Queen Victoria
because the Queen of podcast cameo. I know, name dropping,
but that's enough for now. On Queen Victoria and anesthesia.

(27:39):
If you want to write to us and let us
know some of your own experiences with this topic. Did
you learn that a certain person was the discoverer of
anesthesia when you were growing up and and want to
share with us, Or do you have a really interesting
tental experience that you'd like to share her. Remember we
do hear some of those sometimes. We know that our
our podcast is on this and for some people who

(28:02):
use it while they're getting your root canals done, that's true.
Or maybe you just have some completely unrelated suggestions that
you want to share with us. You can write to
us and send us all those Things at History podcast
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if you want to learn a little bit more about
the topic we talked about today, we do have an

(28:24):
article called how Anesthesia Works and you can find that
by searching on our homepage at www dot how stuff
works dot com. Be sure to check out our new
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(28:44):
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