Named for a Union general from Indiana, Hoosier dentist Daniel Macauley Wood (1868 to 1934) moved to Ohio as founding business manager by 1900 for Cincinnati’s Union Painless Dentists (left, “Uncle Sam” holds “Old Glory” on their trade card’s obverse). In 1906, Wood began training his replacement, a patriotic Spanish-American War veteran who had actually been born on Independence Day, Dr. John F. Frueh (1877 to 1920). The hapless Frueh had recently married in Cincinnati after his original wedding plans had been flattened by the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Dr. Frueh took pains to use and advertise the cocaine-laced “application to the gum” (right, from the trade card’s reverse) previously popularized by “Specialist” Wood. Unfortunately, Dr. Dan Wood may have self-medicated his manic behavior with his namesake anesthetic. Indeed, divorce proceedings revealed that Dr. Wood had bankrupted his household while maintaining three mistresses. So ironically, his cocaine concoction had salvaged the seismically shifted Frueh, but its aftershocks had leveled the house of Wood. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)

Named for a Union general from Indiana, Hoosier dentist Daniel Macauley Wood (1868 to 1934) moved to Ohio as founding business manager by 1900 for Cincinnati’s Union Painless Dentists (left, “Uncle Sam” holds “Old Glory” on their trade card’s obverse). In 1906, Wood began training his replacement, a patriotic Spanish-American War veteran who had actually been born on Independence Day, Dr. John F. Frueh (1877 to 1920). The hapless Frueh had recently married in Cincinnati after his original wedding plans had been flattened by the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Dr. Frueh took pains to use and advertise the cocaine-laced “application to the gum” (right, from the trade card’s reverse) previously popularized by “Specialist” Wood. Unfortunately, Dr. Dan Wood may have self-medicated his manic behavior with his namesake anesthetic. Indeed, divorce proceedings revealed that Dr. Wood had bankrupted his household while maintaining three mistresses. So ironically, his cocaine concoction had salvaged the seismically shifted Frueh, but its aftershocks had leveled the house of Wood. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)

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Melissa L. Coleman, M.D., Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, and George S. Bause, M.D., M.P.H., Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.