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It was not until 1844 that the gas was first used as an anesthetic. At that time, a medical school dropout named Gardner Colton put on a traveling show involving nitrous oxide. He put on a show in Hartford, Connecticut and during the show, a young man under the effects of the gas, gashed his leg while stumbling around the stage. The young man, though badly injured, was unaware of the injury until the effects of the gas wore off. A dentist in the audience, Horace Wells observed this and realized that N2O may produce a painkilling effect. The following day he arranged an experiment in which he had his own molar extracted by his partner while under the effect of 100% nitrous oxide. Dr. Wells experienced no pain during the procedure and the birth of nitrous oxide as an anesthetic had arrived.6, 7
After this, Wells set out to unveil his discovery to the medical community. Unfortunately, while demonstrating the effects of nitrous oxide on a patient at Harvard Medical School, Wells' patient complained of feeling "slight discomfort" during the extraction. Wells was booed off of the stage and in the aftermath of the incident, he lost his professional reputation and eventually committed suicide. However, to this day, Wells is considered the "Discoverer of Anesthesia."
Gardner Colton continued to experiment with the gas and eventually opened a dental business through which he and his partners extracted around 75,000 teeth in a five-year span around 1868 using 100% N2O anesthesia. Today, nitrous is widely used in both medicine and dentistry. Nitrous oxide has proven a very safe and popular sedative agent and a mild anesthetic agent at higher concentrations. Administered properly, the nitrous oxide-oxygen technique has a very high success rate with a very small number of adverse effects and complications.7
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