Wells, Horace

Historians credit the first public demonstration of true surgical anesthesia to William Morton, an American dentist (Fenster 2001). In 1844, Horace Wells, who was a dentist in Hartford, Connecticut, attended a public lecmre demonstration of the effects of laughing gas. One member of the audience had volunteered to inhale the nitrous oxide and then accidentally gashed his leg but felt no pain. Wells asked William Morton to... 

Meanwhile in America, laughing gas was appearing in traveling medicine shows and carnivals. Gardner Quincy Colton, a former medical student, presided over one of these nitrous oxide demonstrations in Hartford, Connecticut, in December of 1844. One of the audience volunteers who had just inhaled the gas injured his leg without feeling any pain. In the audience was dentist Horace Wells, who took note of this and immediately seized on the idea that nitrous oxide might be a powerful anesthetic in the operating room. 

Horace Wells and William T. G. Morton, introduced volatile anesthetics in the 1840s... 

Dentists were instrumental in the introduction of gaseous anesthetics because they came in daily contact with persons suffering from excruciating pain, often of their own making. It was during a theatrical production that Horace Wells, a dentist,... 

The information presented here was gathered during lengthy discussions with Dr. Harriet Frush and Dr. Horace Isbell, as well as from correspondence with Dr. Robert Schaffer, her superior at the National Bureau of Standards, and her niece Roselyn Lomax. The contributions of the last two are gratefully acknowledged. 

Horace Wells, a dentist, attended Colton s nitrous-oxide exhibition in Hartford, Connecticut, and noticed that when one of the audience members who had sniffed nitrous oxide tripped and cut his leg, he was astounded to feel no pain. Wells experimented the very next day by having a fellow dentist pull out one of his own teeth after Wells inhaled nitrous oxide. After awakening and feeling the empty hole where his troublesome wisdom tooth had been. Wells exclaimed, It is the greatest discovery ever made. I didn t feel so much as a prick of a pin ... 

Horace Wells, a dentist in Hartford, Connecticut, introduced nitrous oxide to produce anaesthesia during dental extraction. 

Humphrey Davey first suggested the use of nitrous oxide as an inhalation anaesthetic in 1800. This gas was used for many years as laughing gas for entertainment. Around this time, an American dentist, Horace Wells, used it medicinally during the extraction of one of his own teeth. 

P. T. Barnum (1810-1891) created a sideshow exhibit in which people were invited to test the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide. After seeing a demonstration of this kind, the American dentist Horace Wells (1815-1848) first used nitrous oxide as an anesthetic on his patients. 

There have been many accounts of the first demonstration by the Hartford dentist Horace Wells of the use of nitrous oxide as a surgical anesthetic in 1844. Wells first observed the anesthetic actions of nitrous oxide at a public demonstration of laughing gas. One of the volunteers, a pharmacy clerk named Samuel Cooley, injured his leg while under the influence of this gas and appeared to experience no pain. The next day. Wells inhaled the gas himself and, with the aid of a colleague, had one of his own teeth extracted without any sensation of pain. Wells then began routinely using nitrous oxide for dental procedures in his own practice. In 1845, he attempted to demonstrate the anesthetic effects of nitrous oxide at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. This demonstration was considered to be a failure, however, because the patient cried out... 

One may perhaps wonder why serendipity should be considered under operation of carbon fiber plant but there is a good reason. The word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 and is defined in the dictionary as the faculty of discovering pleasing or valuable things by chance. However, Louis Pasteur said In the fields of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind, later to be paraphrased by an eminent American physicist, Joseph Henry, as The seeds of great discovery are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them [1]. 

Several scientific milestones transformed dentistry in the nineteenth century. In 1844, Horace Wells administered nitrous oxide to a patient before a tooth extraction, becoming the first dentist to use anesthesia. In 1890, dentist Willoughby Dayton Miller connected microbes to the decay process, extending the germ theory to dental disease. In 1898, William Hunter introduced the term oral sepsis to the profession of dentistry and called attention to the contaminated practices and instruments used by dentists. In 1918, radiology was added to dental school curricula, and by the 1930 s, most dentists in the United States were using X rays as part of routine dental diagnostics. 

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