Horace Wells

Horace Wells demonstrated anaesthesia to a Harvard audience, the patient cried out, the students called it a humbug, and he killed himself three years later. He was a dentist in Hartford, Connecticut, well regarded and inventive, who in December 1844 attended a travelling exhibition of nitrous oxide given by Gardner Colton and watched a man under the gas gash his own leg without noticing. The next day he had Colton administer it to him while his colleague John Riggs pulled one of his teeth, and he felt nothing. He used it on patients through the winter with success. Through his former pupil and partner William Morton he arranged a demonstration at the Massachusetts General Hospital in January 1845; the gas was withdrawn too early, the patient groaned, and Wells was hissed out of the theatre. Morton went on to use sulphuric ether at the same hospital in October 1846 to complete success, and the priority dispute that followed - between Morton, Wells, Charles Jackson and Crawford Long - consumed all four. Wells gave up dentistry, travelled to Paris to press his claim, and began experimenting on himself with chloroform. In January 1848, deranged after several days of it, he ran into the street in New York and threw acid at two women, and was jailed in the Tombs. He wrote a letter to his wife, anaesthetised himself with chloroform and cut his femoral artery with a razor. The American Dental Association recognised him as the discoverer of anaesthesia in 1864.

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