SYMHC Classics: Horace Wells and the Gas War

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. We recently talked about Humphrey Davy, including his work with nitrous oxide, and we talked about how it wasn't until later that people really started using nitrous oxide for medical purposes rather than for recreation. Prior hosts talked about the shift to more medical use in their episode called Horace Wells and the Gas War, and that originally came out April thirtieth, twenty twelve. Of course, that means this episode includes some references to medical and dental experiments and procedures that were being done without any kind of anesthesis, So if you're squeamish about that, heads up. And there are some references to some unethical experimentation. Also. The later part of Wells's story involves drug misuse on his part and a violent attack that he made against two sex workers while under the influence. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

00:01:06
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to Blaine and Chucker Boarding and I'm faird douty. And it always surprised me when I was growing up that going to the dentist was characterized as such a 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 seemed like all the little kid characters hated going to the dentists. 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.

00:01:39
Speaker 3: I actually haven't had a cavity yet, so ut I mean, knock on wood here, I don't want to tell yeah.

00:01:44
Speaker 2: In the pod you're still yeah, it could happen.

00:01:46
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean I agree with your old perspective. Going to the dentist. Isn't that bad.

00:01:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, you get treats, you know, you get free toothpaste or whatever. People are nice to you. It's fine. So many of you, like me have probably experience 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 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.

00:02:43
Speaker 3: But things didn't really quite turn out 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 going to look at the build up too and the fallout from this so called gas war, as well as Welles's tragic later life that some people believe made him the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's Doctor Juckyll and mister Hyde.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: Before we get into Well's story, though, we need to point out that while he's often credited as the discoverer of anesthesia, Inhalaesian anesthesia specifically. There were a lot of people who played a part in this discovery. English chemist and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley, for example, first discovered nitrous oxide gas in seventeen seventy two. Later that century, British scientist Sir Humphrey Davey 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.

00:03:51
Speaker 3: So by eighteen hundred or so, Davey had realized that nitrous oxide's promise as a painkiller was really there, and it's medical applications where they are 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 ether two 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 Dublina just mentioned. They would suck the gas out of balloons and laughing gus also became a form of entertainment for the masses too. Traveling shows would charge admission and allow volunteers to 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.

00:04:45
Speaker 2: It could be that because nitrous oxide was associated with this silliness, the medical community didn't really take it seriously of the sideshow act, right, and that might be one explanation for why it wasn't used in medical applications at this time. Meanwhile, surgeries and dental procedures, though like tooth extraction, continued to be carried out without any anesthesia. Patients would sometimes get a swig of alcohol or opium or mandrake 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.

00:05:20
Speaker 3: A good example of this from a recent episode would be poorled mister Bronte with his eye surgery, and how I just imagine how horrific something like that would be without any kind of sedative.

00:05:32
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 it was kind of a mess. And that's why for surgeons speed was really a virtue at the time. It was hard to make a lot of advancements in surgery, though, because you were just trying to get things done as quickly.

00:06:16
Speaker 3: As possible for your patient escapes.

00:06:18
Speaker 1: Right.

00:06:19
Speaker 2: So this was the state of the medical community when Horace Wells came onto the scene. He was born January twenty first, eighteen fifteen, 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's parents were able to give him pretty much everything that he needed while growing up. He went to private schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and according to an article by Peter H. Jacobson and Anesthesia Progress, Wells proved to be intelligent and inventive at a very early age.

00:06:52
Speaker 3: So in eighteen thirty four, when Wells was about nineteen years old, he started training as a dentist in Boston by a way of what was known then as the preceptor 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.

00:07:08
Speaker 2: We did.

00:07:09
Speaker 3: 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.

00:07:19
Speaker 2: 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 dentists in town, and his patients included people like the governor 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, 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.

00:08:01
Speaker 3: 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, 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 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 instrument, so it's not too surprising that this problem would eventually set the wheels in his head turning.

00:09:02
Speaker 2: According to Jacobson's article, in about eighteen forty, Wells told Hartford physician Linus P. 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, eighteen forty four, he read in the Hertford Current that there would be laughing gas exhibition, the kind of the kind that we mentioned.

00:09:30
Speaker 3: A little earlier.

00:09:30
Speaker 2: That's fun, right, So it was going to be put on that evening in the city by Gardner Q. Colton. It was billed as quote a grand exhibition of the effects produced by inhaling nitrous oxide exhilarating or laughing gas. And I have that Hartford Current article here, a little piece from it, 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 by 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 nitrosoxide is forty gallons of gas will be prepared and administered to all in the audience 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 to fight. The effect of the gas is to make those who inhale it either laugh, sing, dance, speak, or fight, and etc. Etc. 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, Oh totally so. Colton would travel around to various cities putting on these ships. Most sources say that he had been a med student one time and that's how he got introduced to nitrous oxide in the first place.

00:11:06
Speaker 3: 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, probably a talk later printed in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, Culton 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 dose of the gas himself, something that he always did, maybe to reassure the audience nothing too bad was going to happen. The gas he used was contained in a 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 fix. One of the volunteers that evening, the evening that Wells was there was a young drugstore clerk named Sam Cooley, who happened to be sitting right near Wells.

00:12:11
Speaker 2: What happened to Cooley 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 mistook him for some imaginary enemy that he had made up in his head. He ate strong men exactly. Cooley then jumped the ropes and started chasing the sky around the exhibition hall. At one point he even leapt over a settee after him, and then finally came to his sensus. Eventually, when Cooley sat back down, Wells noticed him sort of roll up his pant leg and reveal an injured and bleeding wound. When Wells questioned him about it, Cooley said that he hadn't noticed it happened at all. He had felt no pain until the nitrous oxide wore off, and then he sort of realized like, oh that kind of risli, Yeah, what happened, and then he rolled up his pant leg and saw it. That's when Wells had his light bulb moment, realizing what nitrous oxide could mean for the dental and medical professions. According to Jacobson's article, Wells approached Coulton 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.

00:13:26
Speaker 3: But Wells didn't really waste any time in doing that. He arranged for Colton to meet him the next morning at his office with some nitrous oxide, and he also told his colleague and former student Rigs, who he 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 bothering him, and he proposed that he would inhale the nitrous oxide and then have Rigs pull out the tooth. So they all met up at Wells' office next morning as planned, the morning of December eleventh, eighteen forty four. Wells riggs Colton in this bag of gas. I mean, it sounds like it's going to be a joke, set up or something. Cooley was there too, since he was sort of the guy who had set this whole thing off, And when Wells 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 theory out.

00:14:32
Speaker 2: Once he was under the influence, 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 ye had to put life 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 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.

00:15:05
Speaker 3: So after this, Rigs and Wells devoted 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 for two Hertford doctors who used it during operation. 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.

00:15:30
Speaker 2: Wells said later that they experimented with other gases too, including ether, but after consulting with a local physician, he decided to stick with the nitrous oxide because it was considered safer. After these additional tests, so to speak, Wells decided that it was time to share what he'd 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 anything from 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 the discovery. Later attagonists, yes, so he looked into making a presentation in Boston, which was the important hub in the US at the time, the Medical Hub Medical Hub exactly. In doing so, he reconnected with his old student and colleague Morton, who'd been studying medicine, who had just begun studying medicine at Harvard.

00:16:37
Speaker 3: 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 really much help because he was so skeptical of this whole thing. Then he put him in touch with doctor 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 twentieth, eighteen forty five, and Wells was supposed to administer 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. He had a willing patient there, so.

00:17:34
Speaker 2: Wells had the student inhale the gas, and when he thought he was ready, he started to extract the tooth. The student 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. Wells theorized later that he'd 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.

00:18:18
Speaker 3: 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 forty five he was referring all of his patients to Riggs. He said his experience in Boston brought on quote an illness from which I did not recover for many months. He finally started practicing dentistry again sporadically later in the year. He continued to use nitrous oxides successfully during procedures. I mean interesting that he's still so sure that it works, but he takes it so hard this fiasco in 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, and he also patented a new kind of shower bath.

00:19:17
Speaker 2: In the meantime, though, others had begun to share Well's interest in Inhalaitian anesthesia, namely his old buddy Morton. In eighteen forty six, Morton announced his discovery of ether as an anesthetic, saying that he'd tested it successfully on many patients, and according to an article by UCLA professor fa Caranza on the discovery of anesthesia, it was Morton's old mentor, Jackson, who'd actually suggested that Morton use ether in place of nitrous oxide in his experiments. On October tenth of that year, Morton demonstrated his technique at Massachusetts General Hospital during an operation in which doctor Warren removed a tumor from a patient's neck. It was a scenario that was very similar, of course, to the Wells had faced before, but it was considered a success, and the entire medical community was paying attention to what Morton was doing.

00:20:07
Speaker 3: Still though, it almost immediately kicked off a controversy about who deserved credit for the discovery of anesthesia, and Wells wrote a calm collected letter to the Hartford Current in December of eighteen forty six, basically outlying 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 ether in the past but really preferred to work with nitrous oxide. You know, he hadn't been completely clueless about ether.

00:20:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that was one of the points that was probably being great 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. Jackson all so 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 Wells wanted to do this demonstration, it's we're skeptical, very skeptical of the whole thing. Another doctor, one that we know the name of well being living in Georgia, doctor Crawford Long of Georgia, 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 experimenting with it.

00:21:33
Speaker 3: It's Crawford Long's name that I've always heard connected to this whole subject, So there you go.

00:21:38
Speaker 2: But Long, for whatever reason, never demonstrated this to the public or communicated it to the medical community until after Morton's success became public.

00:21:48
Speaker 3: So all of this back and forth. All of this battling kicked off what Wells's wife later called the Gas War according to Jacobson's article, and Wells really made it his mission and after that to prove his claim to the discovery, 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 petitioned the Academy of Medicine and the French Academy of Sciences and the Parisian Medical Society with his claim by February eighteen forty seven, 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.

00:22:45
Speaker 2: In the meantime, Wells also started experimenting more with ether and chloroforms forms of 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 twenty first, eighteen forty eight, which was his thirty third birthday, while under the influence of chloroform, Wells took some sulphuric acid from his office and threw it on to prostitutes, burning one of their necks. After this, he was jailed in Tombs prison. He was allowed to get a few things from home though before getting locked up, and two of the things he brought with him were some chloroform and a razor.

00:23:32
Speaker 3: On January twenty fourth, eighteen forty eight, he inhaled some chloroform while in his cell and then committed suicide by slashing his left femoral 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 the use 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 MD and made him an honorary member of the society. But of course Wells didn't learn about any of this before his death.

00:24:10
Speaker 2: So it was a sad end for a guy who was really passionate about his career and about reducing patient's pain. Ultimately that's what he wanted. But it was that decline towards the end that some say influenced the Doctor Jekyl and mister Hyde's 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, so here.

00:24:32
Speaker 3: But I mean, I can see the connection between self experimenting, which I know is a common thing in the medical world at this time, but sure making yourself into from somebody who's respectable and innovative into somebody who is burning prostitutes with selfioric as.

00:24:49
Speaker 2: A little bit of a monster. He continued to receive honors even after his death, though in eighteen sixty four and eighteen seventy respectively, the American Dental Association in the American medical asociation both recognize 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 used inhalation agents earlier than Wells did. And as you mentioned, I mean, that's who you think of when you think of the discovery of anesthesia. For other people, it might be Morton. So there are a lot of people that could lay claim to this, but it's Wells who really recognize the true potential of what he'd found and sought to get the word out about it with apparently no desire for profit. And it's that point again that we come back to because Morton handled it differently he did.

00:25:39
Speaker 3: 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 letheon and tried to disguise it scent. He wanted to try to make it a patented gas because of course everybody was interested in using it at this point, But it eventually came out that it was just ether. You know, it's 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.

00:26:13
Speaker 2: And after that, Morton still tried to get a patent. He tried to pat and he's like, Okay, 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 continued to compete to be recognized as the true discoverer of anesthesia, and they both pursued a one hundred thousand dollars award for the honor from US Congress. Morton even 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.

00:26:49
Speaker 3: Sounds like it got pretty pretty dirty at the end there, so Wells 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 there was a winner, it was probably just society at large. You know that you wouldn't have to get your eye surgery like mister Bronte, or get your wisdom tooth yanked out without something delling the pain.

00:27:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, going to the dentist could be a pleasure for people everywhere rather than just something that you dread. And the use of anesthesia 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 so you know, no matter who we can give total credit to for discovering anesthesia, probably all of these people. There's no doubt that it did good.

00:27:48
Speaker 3: And I feel like there's one more person we have to mention outside of this gas Wars 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 helped send the message that this was something okay, it was safe. If the Queen was using it, you're good to go to.

00:28:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:28:13
Speaker 2: Also, from a moral standpoint, I think one of 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 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 reference, the Queen of podcast cameos, I know, name dropping.

00:28:52
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.