John Mankey Riggs was born October 25, 1811 in Seymour, Connecticut, the seventh child of John and Mary (Beecher) Riggs, both of English ancestry and Revolutionary stock. His baptismal name was John, but while a student at college he assumed the middle initial M, and said that it stood for Mankey. He spent his boyhood on his father's farm, attended the district school, and worked for a time as a blacksmith.
Deciding to become an Episcopal clergyman, he entered Washington (now Trinity) College at Hartford in 1835, and received the degree of A. B. in 1837.
Always an independent thinker, with the courage of his convictions, he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity while at college and therefore abandoned the idea of entering the ministry. Shortly after his graduation he served for two years as principal of the Brown (previously the Stone) School, now the First District School of Hartford. He then took a partial course at the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia, but becoming interested in dentistry, studied for that profession with Dr. Horace Wells, of Hartford.
He began practice as a dentist about 1840. He was associated with Dr. C. Kirkland for a short time, and with Dr. Daniel Dwyer from 1865 to 1877.
Thereafter he practised independently at Hartford. He was also interested in scientific agriculture and often spoke at meetings of agricultural societies.
Throughout his dental career he was a strong advocate of hygienic care of the mouth, which he considered the only preventive of caries of the teeth and disease of the gums and alveolar process. His method of treatment Riggs' Disease consisted of removing from the teeth, with scalers of his own design, the salivary and serumnal deposits and any necrosed bone, applying tincture of myrrh, and then polishing the teeth.
He first demonstrated this method to the dental profession in 1865 at the convention of the American Dental Association, of which he was a member. In the same year he joined the Connecticut Valley Dental Association, and at the meeting of this organization in 1867, he demonstrated his treatment and was credited by a formal resolution with the origination of his method.
He was president of the Connecticut State Dental Association in 1867, and of the Connecticut Valley Dental Association in 1871 and 1872.
In 1881 he attended the Seventh International Medical Congress at London, demonstrating and lecturing on his treatment of pyorrhea alveolaris before the Dental Section of that congress. He was active as a speaker and clinician at many professional gatherings, but apparently wrote nothing, the three addresses which are published under his name probably having been delivered impromptu.
On December 11, 1844, at Hartford, he performed an operation which is outstanding in the history of modern anesthesia, extracting a tooth from the mouth of Horace Wells while the latter was under the influence of nitrous oxide gas. The anesthetic property of this gas had been discovered by Wells on the previous evening at a public entertainment given by Gardner Q. Colton, who exhibited the amusing effect of small doses of nitrous oxide, then popularly known as laughing gas. Since one of Wells's teeth needed to be extracted, he had Colton administer the gas the next day, and his former pupil Riggs removed the tooth without pain.
Riggs was a member of the committee of the Connecticut State Dental Association that succeeded in having a statue of Wells erected at Hartford in 1874.
While parading as a veteran of the Foot Guards of the Governor of Connecticut he caught a severe cold which developed into pneumonia and caused his death in his seventy-sixth year. His body was cremated in the Le Moyne furnace.
In religion he was a Naturalist and a Unitarian.
Originally a Whig in politics, he took part with other Hartford men in the formation of the Republican party, and was a vigorous Abolitionist.
Riggs was a man of impressive appearance, marked individuality of character, and decided opinions.
He was a bachelor.
