Horace Wells, the dentist who pioneered the use of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for anesthesia in the 1840s, lived in Westminster as a child, and attended the Red School House, which was just south of the road leading to the Walpole bridge.
Wells was born in Hartford, Vt. in 1815. His father (also Horace) bought a farm in Westminster and young Horace attended local schools before studying dentistry in Boston. A deeply compassionate man, he would often suspend his practice for weeks at a time, he was so disturbed at the pain he was forced to cause his patients.
In 1844 he attended a demonstration of laughing gas by a Prof. Colton (also a Vermonter.) Wells noticed that one of Colton’s volunteers fell and bruised himself severely, yet felt no pain. The next day Wells invited Colton to his office to administer laughing gas to him; then Wells’s assistant pulled the anesthetized dentist’s wisdom tooth.
Wells was elated, and went on to specialize in painless extractions. But his attempts to spread the word were marred when he administered too little gas during a demonstration and the patient cried out in pain.
Wells was hissed by the students and declared a humbug. Undaunted, he traveled to Europe, where the new method was well-received.
But in the meantime one of Wells’s assistants was discrediting nitrous oxide and promoting his own ether formula. Wells was discouraged; he opened a practice in New York, where, following a week of self-experimenting with morphine, he ran out onto the street and threw acid on two prostitutes. He was imprisoned, and when he came to himself and realized what he had done, he committed suicide.
Wells is widely recognized as the father of modern anesthesiology, and may be the only Westminster person to have a statue erected in his honor. He has three; one in Hartford, Ct., where he had his dental practice. a bronze bust at the Army Medical Museum in Washington D.C., and one in Paris.
At one time it was apparently proposed to build a memorial park in Wells’ s honor at the site of the Red School House in Westminster. He was a man of compassion and courage; his first experiment was on himself, and his discovery spared countless people pain over the years.
Westminster, it’s fair to say, had completely forgotten him, but it’s not too late to remember.
Horace Wells Statue in Hartford, Connecticut