but nonetheless it had a following in this country, too. By the 1820s, students at Yale used laughing gas regularly at their weekend parties to break from their studies. Different from England, someone in America found out quickly how to make money off the giggling gas. A Hartford, Connecticut, dentist, Horace Wells, witnessed a volunteer inhale nitrous oxide in 1844, while someone else cut a long gash into the man’s leg; the man looked down at his wound, wondered aloud about the long red line running down his thigh, and began laughing uncontrollably. The next day, Wells had a fellow dentist administer the “laughing gas” to him and extracted one of his teeth. Wells later commented: “It is the greatest discovery ever made. I didn’t feel as much as the prick of a pin.”8 And so nitrous oxide gave birth to a new profession in America: painless dentistry.
Davy, meanwhile, turned his discovery to more serious medical uses, most notably to surgery: “As nitrous oxide, in its extensive operation, seems capable of destroying physical pain, it may profitably be used with advantage in surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place.”9 While he made that statement in 1800, it took almost half a century more, all the way to 1844, for hospital officials to allow his laughing gas into the operating room in the form of anesthesia. The word first enters the English language (from Latin by way of Greek) in 1721, to describe those who, because of some major paralysis or other disabling injury, experience “a defect of sensation.” In November 1846, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested that the state created by nitrous oxide be named anesthesia, from Greek an, “without,” and aesthesia, “sensibility.” Just two years later, in 1848, anesthesia had already entered common parlance as a loss of all sensation induced by some chemical agent, which, at this early stage in its development, lasted for no more than two or three minutes.
Davy believed that anesthetized patients lay in a state of hibernation, lingering at the border separating life and death. The age had thus to confront this new creature, a breathing human frame that had been intentionally stripped of all feeling. It would do so over and over, in many permutations. Would anyone still call that seemingly inert lump of flesh on the operating table a human being? A truly sensate human being? Did that thing actually “have” a body? Or, more to the point, did it “have” a life? Though the patient felt no pain, he or she or it certainly seemed to lack consciousness. Or, on the other hand, was the patient pure consciousness, the state that everyone so vigorously pursued but that no one could ever name?
Michael Faraday, a chemist and physicist, towered over the Industrial Revolution as one of its chief inventors, producing an electric motor, dry-cell batteries, and a machine that powered a good deal of the revolution: a device he called a dynamo, a word from the Greek meaning “power and force.” He began conducting laboratory experiments at the Royal Institution in London in 1808, transforming liquids and then reversing the action, a process he called phase changes. In 1818, Faraday, a decade into his intense experiments, concocted an odorless gas that, he claimed, could produce much longer-lasting anesthetic effects than nitrous oxide.
Because of the potency of the new gas, Faraday claimed that he, and he alone, had tapped deeply into the secret compartments of life. So assured was he that he even named his discovery after the element that only the gods had the privilege of breathing—the quintessential or fifth element: the ethereal, or simply ether. With his new success in the laboratory, Faraday bragged, all human beings could now breathe deeply of the very same stuff as the gods; but the question remained, could they feel godlike? Crawford Long, a young doctor in Jefferson, Georgia, threw a series of wild parties where he dispensed ether to his guests, which he called his “ether frolics.” A protégé of the dentist Horace Wells, named William Thomas Green Morton, administered ether to a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846. While the Boston Medical Association marked the success of Morton’s operation by naming October 16 Ether Day, the first successful operation using ether as an anesthetic did not take place in England until a year later, in 1847.
BUT SOME OTHER chemist or physicist always lurked in the wings, just waiting to announce the next potion that would throw that all-important switch, releasing the subject from pain and moving him or her into a fully altered state. Thus, in November of 1847, Sir James Simpson, a noted chemist, announced the anesthetic properties of yet another new substance, trichloromethane, that Simpson insisted would place patients in a much less troubled slumber than all the other chemicals combined. He shortened the technical name to chloroform. (A Frenchman named Jean Dumas had compounded the greenish liquid—chloro—in 1834.)
Linda Stratmann, in her book on the history of chloroform, aptly titled Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion, points out that never had anyone devoted so much attention to the quest of deposing consciousness. These experiments, for lots of people, carried real dangers. She says:
Sleep was believed to be a halfway house between consciousness and death, during which the brain, apart from maintaining basic functions, was inactive. The higher functions of the brain, the essence of what made an individual human, were therefore locked in the state of consciousness, and to remove, or suspend, these functions was to reduce man to little more than an animal. The creation of artificial unconsciousness therefore raised the specters of madness and idiocy. It was not only life, reason and intellect that were at risk, for the search was still in progress for the physical seat of the human soul, which might be in some part of the nervous system as yet not fully understood.
And then we have to think about the testimony of an expert, a doctor named James Parke, of Liverpool, who wrote his colleagues these words of warning in 1847: “I contend that we violate the boundaries of a most noble profession when, in our capacity as medical men, we urge or seduce our fellow creatures for the sake of avoiding pain alone—pain unconnected with danger—to pass into a state of existence the secrets of which we know so little at present.” Parke believed the very profession itself was at stake, and he saw the field of medicine headed in the wrong direction. He may have been right, for medicine did begin to focus on two things after mid-century: the cessation of pain, and the prolongation of life.
Such warnings did not, however, go totally unheeded. Parke and others like him prompted a cadre of professionals who believed that they could explore the foundations of life much better and more efficiently, without the use of any chemicals or gases. The list includes mind readers, a great number of spiritualists, ghost talkers, experts on a new phenomenon called paramnesia or déjà vu, showmen, and even some scientists. James Braid, a highly respected Manchester surgeon, embodied all of those categories, along with a fairly large helping of daring and self-promotion. In 1841, reacting to the idea of anything so artificial as chloroform, Braid lectured about a much more powerful and organic fluid that coursed through the limbs of every man, woman, and child, uncovered earlier by the psychologist G. H. Schubert. Braid called this fluid “animal magnetism,” and it did not just hold the key to the secret of life, he told audience after audience; it was life itself. A trained practitioner, Braid advised, could reinvigorate the élan vital in a sickly person, even in someone near death, and, like Paracelsus himself, miraculously return the person to a healthy and robust life. Or, that same practitioner could move a person to a state where feeling totally disappeared, allowing a physician to perform the most complicated operations on the subject using as an anesthetic only Braid’s method.
Braid called his regimen neuro-hypnotism, which he shortened, in 1843, to hypnotism. The popular press called it “nervous sleep” or “magnetic sleep,” a quasi-coma in which people found themselves unusually susceptible to suggestions. No matter the name, Braid, with his new field of hypnotism, or Braidism, as the press came to call it, declared that he had found the philosopher’s stone—the pluck of life—the seat of liveliness itself. And, at the drop of a three-shilling ticket, Braid would most happily prove, through his onstage manipulations, that he could turn a fully animated, waking life off and on in even the most defensive, disbelieving person. Capitalizing on the period’s emphasis on the gaze—in cinema, in the new museums, in photo galleries—Braid would begin each of his performances with the line, “Look into my eyes.”
Braid’s method migrated to America, in the late 1840s, through a flamboyant character named Andrew Jackson