Shownotes Transcript
Hey, you doing okay over there, Ray? You keep picking at your teeth. Yeah, I think I have a cavity or something. I need to get to the dentist soon. I'm really dreading it, though. I get it. Tooth problems are no joke. No, they're not.
Okay, so pull in here. Okay, so we're driving into Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut. This cemetery is huge. Yeah, it is. And there's some famous people buried here, too. J.P. Morgan, for one, the famous financier and the investment banker. He's in the ground here. I bet he didn't take his money with him. Probably not. Hey, you know who else is buried here? Who?
Catherine Hepburn. Whoa, really? She's a movie icon. Yeah, yeah. I forgot that she was actually born in Hartford, wasn't she? And she was, yeah. Okay, right over here. Let's pull over. Okay. Are we here to visit the grave of some other American icon? Sort of. Though you wouldn't remember his name, I guarantee you know what he's associated with. There's the grave right up ahead.
Oh, yeah. Wow. You can't miss that marker, can you? No. Now, there's a dark embossed sculpture on each side. On the broad side is the sculpture of an angel hovering over a man lying on his side with an upturned face. At the bottom, the words read, there shall be no pain and three small stone named markers on the ground in front of it.
And that one right there is who we're here to see. All right. It says Dr. Horace Wells, January 21st, 1815 to January 24th, 1848. Okay. I admit it. I have no idea who he is. Nope. I get that. So we've come to the grave of Dr. Horace Wells to pay our respects to the father of laughing gas.
Hello, I'm Jeff Belanger. And I'm Ray Ogier. Welcome to episode 390 of the New England Legends podcast, where we're always on the hunt for all the wicked strange things that make our part of the world unlike any other. From ghosts, monsters, aliens, roadside oddities, and weird history, we love it all. And we'll explore this odd story that is most definitely a laughing matter right after this word from our sponsor.
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There shall be no pain. Right. That makes sense now that it's the father of laughing gas. I get it. On the skinny side of the grave marker is the sculpture of a woman's head tilted skyward with eyes closed and the words under her read, I sleep to awaken.
This is all making sense now. Right? So dentistry just wouldn't be the same without Dr. Horace Wells. Okay. So I'm looking up a little bit more information about Dr. Wells. He was born back in 1815 in Hartford, Vermont, not the Hartford in Connecticut where we're standing right now. Right. He came from an affluent family and got the opportunity to study dentistry in Boston.
When he was only 23 years old, he published a booklet called An Essay on Teeth, where he advocated for preventative dentistry, especially the use of a toothbrush. Imagine that. So Dr. Wells opened his own dentist office here in Hartford, Connecticut, back in 1836. And his business did well, too. Among his patients were none other than William Ellsworth, who was the governor of Connecticut. That's not bad at all. Clearly, Wells was passionate about his work and career choice.
You've got to respect that. Yeah, you do. Okay, so to see a great moment in dentistry history, let's head back to the year 1844. ♪
It's December 10th, 1844 here in Hartford, Connecticut. Presidential elections were held from November 1st through December 4th this year. And Democratic nominee James Polk narrowly defeated Whig Party candidate Henry Clay. So some changes are coming to Washington. Here in Hartford, though, it's a time for innovation. It is. There's exhibitions coming through town all the time. And for 29-year-old go-getter dentist Horace Wells, he's a person interested in all kinds of innovations.
This morning, Wells is looking through a latest copy of the Hartford Current newspaper. That's when an announcement catches his eye. Go ahead and read this, Ray. Okay.
It says, quote, a grand exhibition of the effect produced by inhaling nitrous oxide, exhilaration or laughing gas will be given at Union Hall this evening. 40 gallons of gas will be prepared and administered to all in the audience who desire to inhale it. 12 young men have volunteered to inhale the gas to commence the entertainment. Tickets, 25 cents.
But that sounds like a, well, a laugh. So the article goes on to explain that the effect of the gas is to make those who inhale it either laugh or sing, dance, speak, or fight, according to the lead trait of their character. Now, the person providing the entertainment and administering the nitrous oxide is a showman named Gardner Quincy Colton. He was born in Vermont, but makes his home in New York City right now.
The article claims Colton gave two shows of the same nature last spring in New York with over 4,000 people in attendance. Horace Wells is sold, so he and his wife Elizabeth make their plans for the evening. The couple arrive at Union Hall and pay their 25 cents each to see the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present for your entertainment the effects of nitrous oxide on your fellow denizens of Hartford. You'll gaze in wonder as the personalities of those who inhale the gas completely change in an instant. Watch them speak, sing, and laugh uncontrollably on the stage before you tonight.
Okay, I see one, two, three, four, yep, yep, 12 men are on stage with Mr. Colton. Hey, isn't one of those men the shopkeeper, Mr. Cooley? Yeah, I think you're right. Okay, so the 12 men are inhaling the nitrous oxide out of this metal contraption that's got like a mask for your mouth, then a tube sticking out from that, maybe eight inches or so, and then a smaller tube sticking down from there where Mr. Colton poured in some of the chemical mixture. Okay.
Boy, that doesn't take long, does it? No. Two of the men have already started to giggle. That guy on the far end has a big smile on his face. I mean, he doesn't seem to have a care in the world, does he? No, he doesn't. It looks like none of these men on stage care about anything.
It's infectious, isn't it? It is. It's pretty funny watching grown men uncontrollably laugh. And there's Horace Wells and his wife Elizabeth in the front row. They're having a good laugh, too. You, sir, Mr. Cooley, why not stand up and dance for us? So Colton is inviting Mr. Cooley to stand up and dance. And like a drunk, Cooley's just stumbling around on his feet. And now he's pretending to waltz around the stage without a partner. Yeah.
It's just really funny. Cooley seems drunk. He's laughing and twirling and... Whoa, watch out for the table! Oh man, that's gotta hurt. Right? Mr. Cooley just whacked his shin on a low table on the side of the stage. But he didn't miss a beat, did he? No, no, he's still dancing and laughing. Yeah, but Dr. Horace Wells is no longer laughing. Look at him. He's leaning forward watching every detail of what just happened.
So the show just ended, and now Wells is approaching Mr. Cooley, who was just on the stage dancing. Wells asks him to lift his pant leg and show him his shin. Oh, ouch. Yeah, that's a pretty good bruise. Cooley just explained that he has no memory of getting that bruise and said it didn't hurt at the time. So Dr. Wells is now marching over to Gardner Colton.
The men are shaking hands and Wells looks positively electric right now. He's very excited. So Mr. Colton agrees to meet him the following day to further discuss nitrous oxide. At their meeting, Colton agrees to sell Wells some nitrous oxide to try on his patients. Being a good medical professional, Dr. Wells declares he'll be the first patient to use it. See, Wells has a tooth that needs pulling, so he arranges for one of his associates to do the job. Okay, Wells is inhaling the nitrous oxide now.
He's starting to laugh. Oh, and Wells' dental associate just pulled his sore tooth. After the gas wears off, Wells declares he felt no pain from the procedure. A new era of pain-free dentistry has begun thanks to his foresight.
His genius. In the coming weeks, Wells would use nitrous oxide on 12 of his patients. Each one claims their procedures were free of pain. To Wells, this is nothing short of a medical breakthrough. Now, Hartford doesn't have a hospital yet, so Dr. Wells takes his nitrous oxide to Boston where he can give a proper demonstration to the medical community.
He meets up with his former student, William Morton, who's currently enrolled at Harvard Medical School. And though Morton is skeptical of nitrous oxide, it's difficult to argue with the results. Morton helps arrange the demonstration. The thing about Wells is that he gets sick a lot, though doctors can't find anything wrong with him.
As time passes, Wells continues to spiral. He opens and closes his dental practice repeatedly. Then in October of 1846, Wells' former student, William Morton, gives a successful demonstration of using ether as anesthesia in Boston. With patients unconscious, surgeries could be performed with ease and far less complications.
The medical community is thrilled. Yeah, but Horace Wells isn't happy at all. He publishes a letter claiming he's truly the father of anesthesia, considering he showed Dr. Morton nitrous oxide. Wells is furious he isn't getting the accolades he feels he deserves. In the coming months, Wells continues to spiral, can't seem to find direction. He closes his dentist business and leaves his wife and young son in Hartford and sails to Paris to try to buy art he can resell in America.
It's January of 1848. Horace Wells is now living alone in an apartment in Lower Manhattan, New York. He's become addicted to sniffing ether and chloroform to get high. After a sniffing bender on his birthday, Wells runs into the streets of New York and throws sulfuric acid onto the clothes of two sex workers standing on the street. Wells is soon arrested and taken to New York's Tombs Prison. After a few days in lockup, the drug wears off, and Wells is left with the horror of what he's done.
Wells asked the guard to escort him to his home where he can get his shaving kit and clean himself up. Once back in prison, Wells sniffs a lethal dose of chloroform he's smuggled in with him in his shaving kit, then slices his own throat with a straight razor. His wife Elizabeth comes to collect the body and bring it back to Hartford for burial. Wells was 33 years old. And that brings us back to today.
Dr. Wells had just turned 33 years old, too. He had his whole life ahead of him, though he never found the fame and glory he searched for. He is considered the father of nitrous oxide use in dentistry. And it's still used today, which is good because my tooth still hurts. It is good, and I'm sorry about your tooth. Have you ever gone in for a regular tooth cleaning and, you know, asked for a hit? Sure, of course. Did your dentist say yes? No. Mine neither.
So today Horace Wells has this epic family grave marker here in Cedar Hill Cemetery. And though the man was horribly broken, there was a time when he paid 25 cents to watch some unique and funny entertainment where he got the spark of an idea that changed the field of dentistry forever.
That he did. And that takes us to After the Legend, where we dive deeper into this week's story and sometimes veer off course. After the Legend is brought to you by our Patreon patrons, a group we hope you'll join. These are our insiders. They help us make this podcast happen because we have no corporate backing. It's just you and us. Our patrons help with our hosting and production costs, travel marketing, everything else it takes to bring you two stories each week.
All we're asking for is three bucks per month, and for that you get early ad-free access to new episodes, you get access to our entire show archive, and you get bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear. Just head over to patreon.com slash newenglandlegends to sign up. And to see some pictures related to this week's story, click on the link in our episode description, go to our website, and click on episode 390. I don't remember the last time I ever had laughing gas, but I think I did have it as a kid. Yeah.
Not too young, though. I don't think they administer it to young kids. It's not a guaranteed laugh, by the way. No, no, it's not. I mean, if you're in, like, the dentist chair with, like, you know, a drill coming at you, you may not be in a jovial mood, you know? Right. But it does make you feel good. It helps. Right. So one of the most fun parts I thought about this is, like, imagine if I was like, hey, Ray, you want to go see a show tonight? I call you, right? And you go, oh, well, what's the show? So it's $25. Let's scale. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
We're just going to watch people get high on stage.
That's kind of weird. Wait a minute. Before you go any further, are you in or are you out? I'm in. Yeah, right? Did we get to get high as well in the audience? I believe they said they brought enough for everybody. I mean, if we're going to follow this all the way through. It's interesting, especially during a time where really probably not too many people were getting high. You didn't really see that. Maybe drunk. Well, they were drinking, sure. At the pub. But this was a different kind of promise. Like, this is high. This is going to be different. It's laughing. It's laughing.
Yeah. It's not a drunk laugh. Right. It's a chemical laugh. And almost 200 years later, we have whippets. Kind of the same thing, right? If you don't know what it is, you're too young, Google it.
Google it and don't do it. Yeah. We were bored as teenagers. Yeah. But this is still used today? Of course it is. Yeah. I don't know. I get the pins or the needles in the gums, which is the worst. Yeah, Novocaine. And I don't like that feeling. I just had it done recently. Yeah. And I hadn't had a cavity in a long time, so maybe like 10, 15 years. Yeah. For some reason, I had one this time.
And I hate that feeling of your mouth being numb. I've had one cavity in my life and it was, it was last year. That's the first cavity I've ever had in my life.
And I've never been Novocaine drilled or any of that stuff. And so I got the Novocaine and he starts to drill and I'm like, I can feel that. So he gives me even more. Yeah. Or whatever it is, you know, Lidocaine, I don't know. But anyway, it's for hours. Oh, yeah. Half your face is just... You can't eat? You're just drooling. Take a drink and it all spills out. Oh, it was terrible. It was terrible. I'm like, give me the laughing gas. Let me just laugh and then be in pain. Let me get high. Yeah. Might as well get high if you're going to drill my teeth. Like, what are you doing with the gummies there? They're going to get stuck in your teeth. Yeah.
Listen, how are we doing this, right? I mean, how's this going to go? So I did want to look up one other fun fact on nitrous oxide because I was like, well, when was it first invented? Joseph Priestley discovered nitrous oxide in 1772. Okay. And in the 1790s, Humphrey Davy started to experiment with the psychotropic properties of nitrous oxide...
with different people, but it was Horace Wells that took it into dentistry. But I was thinking that's a good 40 plus year run where people were just like, you know, we could do some nitrous oxide, put people on stage and charge them to come in and watch people like they're, they're friends and neighbors just like, you know, and it took that long for them to figure out, Oh, this is a pain, um, a good alternative to pain relief. You can feel no pain when you're on it. And so, um, Mr. Cooley really was the, uh,
literally the newspaper article mentioned Mr. Cooley by name saying a local shopkeeper had bumped his leg really hard. Everyone in the audience was like, oh, that's going to hurt. And it was Horace Wells who said, you know, hey, that didn't hurt. I didn't feel anything. I don't remember it.
I'm a dentist. So that happened when he bumped his leg. Yeah. Who was the first person that was promised it wouldn't hurt while drilling through a tooth? Wells. Wells did it on himself first. Oh, that's right. That's right. He did the first, but then he had 12 patients after where he's like, look, you got to have this horrible thing happen, but I'm going to give you this gas and you're not going to feel it. You're not even going to care.
And they were like, I mean, you have to have it done either way. So you want to try the gas or not try the gas. At least he did it on himself first. He did. I forget about that part. He did. And then he became addicted and tried to kill two sex workers and went to jail and took his own life. So everybody was where they wanted to be.
Yeah. What happened to you in your life? Well, I went to the dentist once. Yeah. And the rest is just all downhill. Yeah. That's where it went down. I got addicted to laughing gas. So my teeth look great. We didn't go into it a whole lot, but I mean, he would open and close his dentistry pack practice. Yeah. Like, cause he was, I think he probably had clinical depression. Probably. If we were, you know, and so he found this gas that was getting him high and he didn't feel any pain, any, that includes emotional pain. Right. And, um, probably,
You know, nitrous oxide is not meant to be used in great quantities over a long period of time. It's meant like get your teeth pulled and then, you know,
10 years later, when you need another one pulled, you can do it again. But anything that makes us feel good, boy, we can get addicted to it. Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Was he huffing laughing gas? Because he had some kind of contraption that he would breathe into. So remember Cider House Rules? Yes. So Cider House Rules, he was addicted to ether. Okay. So remember he had that mask cup thing and he would pour a little ether in? And that was the same thing. He was basically...
putting himself into a almost unconscious state. And so it was not uncommon for people to be huffing that stuff, not realizing the long-term damage it could do or...
you know, rewire your brain. Well, it takes the first person to set that thing. I've only had the thing. Listen, don't get too medical, Ray. I'm sorry. I was huffing before you got here. We're pretty lowbrow here. Set the bar. That's what I was just saying. It takes the first person to set the bar. Yeah.
I've only had general anesthesia once, and it was for a colonoscopy, because I'm that age. I did that, too. You don't have to, I guess. Oh, no. They can localize it or something. Oh, no, thanks. Or you can be awake. I know. That's what I told them. I'm like, no. Even at the dentist, it's like, well, some of my patients don't use the Novocaine or whatever they use. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Yeah, yeah. Some people don't mind it. And I'm like, I do. And not all heroes wear capes, right? Right.
But I remember the anesthesia. All I recall of it was the first couple seconds. She was like, you're going to start to feel warm. And I was just like, wee. And then gone. You're out. In your head, you just don't think it's going to work for some reason. That was my initial thought was like, I'm going to count backwards. They're going to have to give me more.
you know, 10 night boom out. And then it was the best rest I ever had. You were just out. I remember saying to the woman who gave it to me, she's like, and it feels like a warm sensation. Cause I had an IV in for the thing. And, um, and then I just went, Oh,
I go night, night now. And she's like, yep. And that's pretty cool. That was, that was it. And then when you wake up, you don't realize time had passed. It's one second. I think when you wake up in the morning from sleeping, you know, Oh, I just slept. Right. But this one, you're like, when are you going to do the process? Yeah. The procedure. You're all done. You're just waking up. So let, let's get your, the clouds out of your head to have a little juice and then we'll get you on your way. Yeah. So no, yeah, it was like one second.
I have one of those coming up in a couple months. By the way, everybody, get it done. Yes, absolutely. There's worse things, I promise. Keep yourself safe. We care about you. That's right. That's all. We care about you and all of your parts. And think about it. When you're having it done and you just go under, indirectly, you can thank Horace Wells.
If you've got something weird in New England you think we should check out, please reach out to us anytime on our website. Don't assume we've heard it before. We love hearing from you, too. Also, check out the latest issue of Shadowzine from Jeff and tune into radio with me each and every morning. You can find links to both in our episode description. We'd like to thank Marv Anderson for lending his voice acting talents this week. Thank you so much to our sponsors and thank you to our Patreon patrons. And our theme music is by Jon Judd. Until next time, remember, the bizarre is closer than you think.
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