The anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, were observed soon after the English chemist Joseph Priestley first prepared it in 1772. But no one used it as an anesthetic until 1844. On December 10 of that year, Horace Wells, a dentist in Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A., attended a lecture at which people were entertained with laughing gas. Wells noticed that a person under its influence scraped his shin on a heavy bench and yet showed no signs of pain. Wells was a sympathetic man and felt deeply disturbed by the pain he inflicted on his patients. He immediately thought of using the gas as an anesthetic. But before giving it to others, he decided to try it on himself. The very next day, he sat down in his own operating chair and inhaled the gas until he lost consciousness. Then a colleague extracted his aching wisdom tooth. This was a historic event. At last, painless dentistry had arrived!a

[Picture on page 29]

An artist’s depiction of the first dental operation using nitrous oxide as an anesthetic, 1844

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Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine