The Best Dentists, Like the Best Anesthesiologists, are an Absolute Gas!

Thank you, Horace Wells, a nineteenth-century dentist, who pioneered the use of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for patients with tooth problems. His discovery was used for the first time on December 11, 1844, when Wells experimented on himself just before his partner extracted Wells's wisdom tooth. When questioned as to his experience, Wells famously responded: "It is the greatest discovery ever made! I didn't feel it so much as the prick of a pin!"

Wells continued to use the anesthetic in his practice for a few years, but experiments on patients who were obese or alcoholic (upon which the gas didn't work so well) compromised his reputation, and he never really recovered from that point on. Still, he continued to experiment on himself with mind-altering substances and (according to his Wikipedia page):

Wells rushed into the street on January 21, 1848, his 33rd birthday, and threw sulfuric acid over the clothing of two prostitutes whom he addressed as "abandoned females." He was committed to New York's infamous Tombs Prison. As the influence of the drug waned, his mind started to clear and he realized what he had done. He asked the guards to escort him to his house to pick up his shaving kit. He committed suicide in his cell on January 24, slitting his left femoral artery with a razor after inhaling an analgesic dose of chloroform. He died at the age of 33. He is buried at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut.

Yeah. Horace Wells very probably did kill himself.

So very sad. Only thirty-three years old.

Fewer than two weeks before his death, the Parisian Medical Society honored and recognized Horace Wells as "the first person who discovered and performed surgical operations without pain…and to the last day of time must suffering humanity bless his name."

I'm so old that I do bless his name.

My first dentist was a man called Mr. Hollick, because dentists in the UK are called “Mister.” Just like veterinarians. (Alumni of either series of All Creatures Great and Small will surely know this already.)

"Hollick" (as Dad always referred to him) had been the family dentist for decades, and he practiced out of his “surgery,” which had formerly been his living room, in a large house in Edgbaston, just outside Birmingham, and not far from the mothership of the Newman Oratory. I remember Hollick as a large man, dark-haired, very kind, and always in a spotless white uniform. His surgery smelled unmistakably of cloves, and his chair had a hitch in it when he tilted it back. If you weren’t hanging on, you almost got flung out backwards. That was relaxing. (LOL. Not really.)

But the gas was, quite. I remember the rubber gas mask over my face and the smell of the rubber, which eventually got overtaken by the smell of the gas, just before I went off to LaLa Land and he pulled out one or another of my baby teeth. For some reason, just before I went under, I always saw flashing lights and heard sirens. I don’t know why.

I didn’t have much truck with the drill at that stage in my life, but I remember it. It had a foot crank. Yes, once again, I really am that old. (People will delight in telling you how old I am. Believe them.) And there wasn’t any Novocain. Just clove oil. Whatever it was good for, other than making me smell like a Christmas pomander, I don’t know. But it was memorable.

Mr. Hollick was a very good dentist, and I have nice memories (relatively speaking and all things considered) of him.

But the best memory of my visits to see him had nothing to do with the gas, or the cloves, or even of the very appreciable drill. It happened at the end of every visit, when Mr. Hollick would pull out an empty little matchbox, in the days when almost everyone had a bagful of empty little matchboxes somewhere in the house—they were very useful when you needed a place to put something small and keep it safe–and into it he’d deposit two or three drops of . . .

. . . mercury.

And I’d giggle and I’d laugh, and I’d take it home with me and play with it for days, splitting it apart and watching it slurp itself back together until, inevitably, I spilled it or lost it somewhere and it was gone, until the next time.

I loved it.

It’s a wonder I survived to adulthood. And that I’m not wracked by guilt over the damage I caused to the environment in my youth.