“A New Era in Tooth-Pulling”
The first dental operation performed on Horace Wells whilst under the influence of nitrous oxide gas
After this, Wells extracted several teeth from his patients under nitrous oxide gas with equal success, and then went to Boston in order to make his discovery known to the medical profession in that city. He remained there some days in the hope of being allowed to try the gas in a case of amputation in the Massachusetts General Hospital, but the experiment was postponed. Dr. Warren, senior surgeon to the institution, however, invited him to address his class on the subject of anæsthesia, after which he was asked to administer the gas in a case of tooth extraction. He was assisted on this occasion by Morton, a Boston dentist who had been his pupil, and afterwards, for a time, his partner. The experiment, as Wells himself confesses, was not quite a success, the gas-bag having been removed too soon. The whole thing was denounced as a piece of humbug, and Wells was hissed out of the room as an impostor.
Wells disheartened by failure
Disheartened at length by the failure of his repeated attempts to establish his claims to priority as the discoverer of anæsthesia, his mind appeared to become affected, and for a time he wandered about the streets of New York. On January 4th, 1848, he was arrested and charged with throwing vitriol, but while in gaol he opened his radial artery, having first inhaled ether to make death painless.The death of Horace Wells This sad event closed, at the age of thirty-two, the career of Horace Wells, to whom at least belongs the credit of having first shown the practicability of producing insensibility by nitrous oxide, and of having thus, in his own words, “established the principle of anæsthesia.”
The Ether Epoch
Probably the first published account of the use of ether as a medicinal agent was made by Morris in a letter read before the Society of Physicians in London,[1] on December 18th, 1758, in which he advocates its use internally, and also as an external application.
[1] “Med. Obs. and Enq.” by the Society of Physicians in London, vol. 2, page 176, 1764.
In 1818, Faraday, as already stated, had called attention to the anæsthetic properties of ether, and showed that the vapour of sulphuric ether, when inhaled, produced effects similar to those of nitrous oxide. After Wells’ failure at Boston nothing further seems to have been done for a time to investigate the use of nitrous oxide as an anæsthetic.