He said I must have smoked considerable tobacco in my time. I responded, as well as the mirror would let me—“tons.” He said it was the best of preservatives for the teeth; and went on tapping around in there with the mirror and examining, while I made mental note of his remark for use against the anti-tobacco incendiaries.

Presently he laid the mirror aside, raked among his bodkins, selected one, gave it a pass or two over an “Arkansas stone,” laid a rag over my chin, placed a couple of fingers where I could have closed on them, and approached my mouth with the bodkin, which he held in the grip of his other hand. I began to shrink into myself and curl together, in a cold nightmare of expectancy. There was a strength-exhausting pause; then the doctor eased up his attitude and began to tell me some particulars concerning the Riggs disease. He said, among other things, that he had known it to so affect a victim’s health as to prostrate him and keep him bed-ridden and helpless during long intervals, the physicians doctoring his stomach, not suspecting that the chief trouble was in the teeth, and so failing to afford relief. He instanced the case of a lady who had lain thus for a long time, under the hands of the most noted physicians of New York, until she was so wasted away that she could be gathered up and carried in one’s arms like a child. When the case came to him, at last, he stopped the medicines, went to work with his dental instruments, and she was presently sound and well.

Then he put his tool into my mouth, rooted it up under a gum and began to carve. He seemed to fetch away chips of bone the size of my hand. In truth, what he removed could hardly have been seen without a microscope, I suppose—but my imagination is a microscope. If I had been honest enough to speak my mind, I would have said “Ow!” to every dig, and shouted it; but I was ashamed to do that, and so only said “Um,” in a low voice, and kept back the exclamation point. The doctor worked fast, and with a hand that was as sure as it was vigorous, though along at first I was all the time expecting the instrument would slip and carry away all my Riggs disease at one rake.

The doctor talked along entertainingly, and I responded “Um” when my turn came—which was when I was hurt or thought I was. I was hurt a little, of course, but I think the main discomfort about the operation was not the pain but the disagreeable sense of having my bone cut into; and then, too, your teeth are so near your ears, that the work sounds like digging gravel and shoveling coal. I could go through those two days of bone-scraping now without minding it much; but I was inexperienced, then, and my imagination exaggerated the pain out of all reason.

At the end of an hour, something was said about chloroform. I knew I did not need it myself, but I believed my imagination did; so I accepted the bottle, and after that I held it always in my hand, and put it to my nose whenever my imagination got too brisk. The chloroform created a radical change; it made everything comfortable and pleasant. The pains were about as sharp as they had been before, but they rather seemed to be impersonal pains; pains that belonged to the community in general, including me, but not me particularly, not me any more than the others. So I did not care for them any longer; I do not care for a pain unless I can have it all to myself. The doctor’s voice seemed removed to a little distance and somewhat subdued, or muffled; but his work seemed more aggressive and vigorous than ever (as perhaps it was), and nearer by, too.

The chloroform introduced the subject of anaesthetics, and the doctor told me about the first painless operation that was ever performed in this world; and his story had a most vivid interest, for the reason that he was the operator himself. We have been so accustomed, all our lives, to hearing about painless surgical operations, that I was as well prepared to be confronted by Columbus himself as to find myself in the living presence of the man who was midwife at the birth of the most merciful, the most beneficent of all the gracious host of the children of Science, the application of anaesthetics to the banishment of human agony. Yet it was true. The world had gone on enduring torture a thousand ages, and then science brought a miracle for its relief worth more than all the miracles that had ever preceded it; and had placed it, as her generous custom is, within the reach of every sufferer, instead of restricting it to a pious half dozen, after the old way. And this prodigious event itself had happened so long ago that it seemed part and parcel with the dim and dreamy antiquities; and yet it was certainly true that here was a man who was there at the time, and saw the thing done; was there, and himself inaugurated an event of such vast influence, magnitude, importance, that one may truly say it hardly has its equal in human history.

It was my ignorance that had made the event so old. It had happened in 1835. The doctor was a young dentist, then, and had just set up his shingle with young Wells. They visited a traveling laughing-gas exhibition one winter night, and were consumed with laughter over the grotesque performances of some of the Hartford youth while under the happy dominion of the gas. Presently one of them, a young chap named Cooley, went sprawling over a chair or a table, and reached the stage with a crash, but immediately jumped up and plunged into the fun again with no diminution of spirit.

I was in the chair a good part of two days—nine hours the first day and five the next—and then came out of it with my thirty-two teeth as polished and ship-shape and raw as if they had been taken out of the sockets and filed. It was a good job, and quickly and skilfully done; but if I opened my mouth and drew in a cold breath it woke up my attention like pouring ice water down my back. I could not touch anything to my teeth for several days, they were so supernaturally sensitive. But after that they became as tough as iron, and a thorough comfort. If by some blessed accident my conscience could catch the Riggs disease, I know what I would do with it.

My teeth had lasted more than twenty years longer than people’s teeth usually last, but they had begun to develop specks of decay here and there, and the doctor said that these places ought to be gouged out and filled; but I had had enough holiday for the present, and said I would chance them five or six years longer.