In his inhalations of the nitrous oxide gas he observed all the phenomena of mental excitement, of exalted imagination, enthusiasm, merriment, restlessness, from which it gained its popular name of “laughing gas”; and he saw people made, at least for some short time and in some measure, insensible by it. So, among other suggestions or guesses about probable medicinal uses of inhalation of gases, he wrote, near the end of his essay: “As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place.”
It seems strange that no one caught at a suggestion such as this. True, the evidence on which it was founded was very slight; it was with a rare scientific power that Davy had thought out so far beyond his facts; but he had thought clearly, and as clearly told his belief. Yet no one earnestly regarded it. The nitrous oxide might have been of as little general interest as the carbonic or any other, had it not been for the strange and various excitements produced by its inhalation. These made it a favourite subject with chemical lecturers, and year after year, in nearly every chemical theatre, it was fun to inhale it after the lecture on the gaseous compounds of nitrogen; and among those who inhaled it there must have been many who, in their intoxication, received sharp and heavy blows, but, at the time, felt no pain. And this went on for more than forty years, exciting nothing worthy to be called thought or observation, till, in December, 1844, Mr. Colton, a popular itinerant lecturer on chemistry, delivered a lecture on “laughing gas” in Hartford, Connecticut. Among his auditors was Mr. Horace Wells, an enterprising dentist in that town, a man of some power in mechanical invention. After the lecture came the usual amusement of inhaling the gas, and Wells, in whom long wishing had bred a kind of belief that something might be found to make tooth-drawing painless, observed that one of the men excited by the gas was not conscious of hurting himself when he fell on the benches and bruised and cut his knees. Even when he became calm and clear-headed the man was sure that he did not feel pain at the time of his fall. Wells was at once convinced—more easily convinced than a man of more scientific mind would have been—that, during similar insensibility, in a state of intense nervous excitement, teeth might be drawn without pain, and he determined that himself and one of his own largest teeth should be the first for trial. Next morning Colton gave him the gas, and his friend Dr. Riggs extracted his tooth. He remained unconscious for a few moments, and then exclaimed, “A new era in tooth-pulling! It did not hurt me more than the prick of a pin. It is the greatest discovery ever made.”
In the next three weeks Wells extracted teeth from some twelve or fifteen persons under the influence of the nitrous oxide, and gave pain to only two or three. Dr. Riggs, also, used it with the same success, and the practice was well known and talked of in Hartford.
Encouraged by his success Wells went to Boston, wishing to enlarge the reputation of his discovery and to have an opportunity of giving the gas to some one undergoing a surgical operation. Dr. J. C. Warren, the senior Surgeon of the Massachusetts General Hospital, to whom he applied for this purpose, asked him to show first its effects on some one from whom he would draw a tooth. He undertook to do this in the theatre of the medical college before a large class of students, to whom he had, on a previous day, explained his plan. Unluckily, the bag of gas from which the patient was inhaling was taken away too soon; he cried out when his tooth was drawn; the students hissed and hooted; and the discovery was denounced as an imposture.
Wells left Boston disappointed and disheartened; he fell ill, and was for many months unable to practice his profession. Soon afterwards he gave up dentistry, and neglected the use and study of the nitrous oxide, till he was recalled to it by a discovery even more important than his own.
The thread of the history of nitrous oxide may be broken here.
The inhalation of sulphuric ether was often, even in the eighteenth century, used for the relief of spasmodic asthma, phthisis, and some other diseases of the chest. Dr. Beddoes and others thus wrote of it: but its utility was not great, and there is no evidence that this use of it had any influence on the discovery of its higher value, unless it were, very indirectly, in its having led to its being found useful for soothing the irritation produced by inhaling chlorine. Much more was due to its being used, like nitrous oxide, for the fun of the excitement which its diluted vapor would produce in those who freely inhaled it.
The beginning of its use for this purpose is not clear. In the Journal of Science and the Arts, published in 1818 at the Royal Institution, there is a short anonymous statement among the “Miscellanea,” in which it is said, “When the vapor of ether mixed with common air is inhaled, it produces effects very similar to those occasioned by nitrous oxide.” The method of inhaling and its effects are described, and then “it is necessary to use caution in making experiments of this kind. By the imprudent inspiration of ether a gentleman was thrown into a very lethargic state, which continued with occasional periods of intermission for more than thirty hours, and a great depression of spirits; for many days the pulse was so much lowered that considerable fears were entertained for his life.”
The statement of these facts has been ascribed to Faraday, under whose management the journal was at that time published. But, whoever wrote or whoever may have read the statement, it was, for all useful purposes, as much neglected as was Davy's suggestion of the utility of the nitrous oxide. The last sentence, quoted as it was by Pereira and others writing on the uses of ether, excited much more fear of death than hope of ease from ether-inhalation. Such effects as are described in it are of exceeding rarity; their danger was greatly over-estimated; but the account of them was enough to discourage all useful research.
But, as the sulphuric ether would “produce effects very similar to those occasioned by nitrous oxide,” and was much the more easy to procure, it came to be often inhaled, for amusement, by chemists' lads and by pupils in the dispensaries of surgeons. It was often thus used by young people in many places of the United States. They had what they called “ether-frolics,” in which they inhaled ether till they became merry, or in some other way absurdly excited or, sometimes, completely insensible.