In 1844, Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist, encountered nitrous oxide, or laughing gas--then an entertainment for performers in carnival-like theatrical acts-

Fire sweeps along the wall of a circus tent while inside thousands of people enjoy a Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey matinee. Within minutes, flames con

"Combining a reporter's eye for detail, the breathless narrative rush of an action movie and the generous heart of a hometown boy desperately trying to make sen

From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the w

In 1846 William Thomas Green Morton (1819-1868) performed the first publicly-witnessed surgery to use ether as an anesthetic when he removed a neck tumor from a