Horace Wells

Horace Wells (1815–1848) was an American dentist who pioneered the use of nitrous oxide to prevent pain during dental procedures.

Nitrous oxide: A colorless gas used as an anesthetic and analgesic, commonly called laughing gas. Wells used the gas to produce insensibility during dental extraction.
General anesthesia: A drug-induced state of unconsciousness, loss of sensation, and reduced response to painful stimuli. Wells sought a broader anesthetic state than local numbing for tooth extraction.
William T. G. Morton: An American dentist who publicly demonstrated ether anesthesia in Boston in 1846. Morton’s successful demonstration gained recognition that Wells’s earlier public attempt did not.
History of anesthesia: The development of methods and drugs that reduce pain or awareness during medical procedures. Wells’s experiments belong to the early transition from painful surgery to planned anesthesia.
Gardner Quincy Colton: An American lecturer and physician who popularized demonstrations of nitrous oxide. Colton’s gas demonstration in 1844 prompted Wells to test nitrous oxide as an anesthetic.
Analgesia: The reduction or absence of pain without necessarily causing loss of consciousness. Nitrous oxide can lessen pain even when it does not fully render a patient unconscious.
Charles Thomas Jackson: An American physician and chemist who claimed a role in the discovery of ether anesthesia. Jackson became entangled with Morton in disputes over credit for anesthesia.
Anesthesia awareness: Conscious awareness during a procedure intended to be performed under general anesthesia. Early anesthetic demonstrations made inadequate dosing and unintended awareness visible risks.
John Riggs: An American dentist known for his work on gum disease and his association with Horace Wells. Riggs extracted Wells’s tooth during the dentist’s early nitrous oxide trial.
Anesthetic depth: The degree to which anesthesia suppresses awareness, movement, and responses to stimulation. Wells’s early trials exposed the difficulty of producing a reliable depth of anesthesia.

Linked from 8 pages