ABSTRACT
Horace Wells, a dentist, is credited with the first clinical demonstration of surgical anesthesia with N20 in 1844. Thefirsttest subject was Wells himself, who had a troublesome wisdom tooth painlessly extracted by a colleague while Wells was under N20. Wells quickly became an ardent advocate of N20 for surgical anesthesia and employed it during dental extraction and other surgical procedures. However, a demonstration at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1845 ended dismally when an insufficiently-dosed test subject complained of pain. Wells was ridiculed, discredited and soon after committed suicide (Smith, 1966; Frost, 1985). Posthumously, Wells was recognized as the discoverer of anesthesia.
