Destiny of the Republic (35 page)

Bell made no further entries in his laboratory notebook about the induction balance until October 25. On that day, however, his notes covered four pages. “An old idea not previously noted came back to me with considerable significance,” he wrote from a hotel room in Paris. A few days later, he returned once again to the invention, with the same determination and enthusiasm he had had from the moment of its inception.

Bell knew that the induction balance was important. His mistake was in believing that, because it had not worked on the president, no one would be willing to use it. In the years to come, the induction balance would lessen the suffering and save the lives not just of Americans but of soldiers in the Sino-Japanese War and the Boer War. Even during World War I, doctors would often turn to the induction balance when they could not find an X-ray machine, or did not trust its accuracy.

The induction balance, however, was not the only medical invention that would come out of this difficult time in Bell’s life. The death of his son also inspired him to build a machine that would essentially breathe for those who, like Edward, could not breathe for themselves. The invention, which he called a vacuum jacket, consisted primarily of an airtight iron cylinder that encircled the patient’s torso, and a suction pump that forced air into his lungs. The vacuum jacket was a precursor to the iron lung, which would help thousands of people breathe during the polio epidemic of the 1940s and early 1950s.

Bell, still a young man, had an astonishingly busy and productive life yet ahead of him. Soon after Garfield’s death, he would become a United States citizen. In 1888, he and a small group of like-minded men would found the National Geographic Society, whose ambition it was to create “a society for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.” About the same time, Bell also founded the Volta Bureau, “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the Deaf.” In 1893, he moved the bureau into a yellow-brick and sandstone building, now a National Historic Landmark, on Thirty-fifth Street in Washington, D.C., directly across the street from where he had earlier moved his Volta Laboratory.

Although he would continue to work on a wide range of inventions, most strikingly with various forms of flight, for Bell, the desire to help and teach the deaf would be the overarching passion of his life. In 1886, Captain Arthur Keller traveled to Washington from Alabama to see Bell. He brought with him his six-year-old daughter, Helen, who had been left blind, deaf, and mute after contracting what may have been scarlet fever when she was nineteen months old. Years later, Helen Keller would remember that meeting with Bell as the “door through which I should pass from darkness into light.” So grateful was she to Bell that sixteen years later, she would dedicate her autobiography to him.

Keller wrote her memoirs when she was just twenty-two years old, but Bell, even near the end of his life, refused to write his own. When repeatedly asked to put down on paper the extraordinary events of his life, his reply was always the same: He was “still more interested in the future than in the past.”

Bell would live to be seventy-five years old, dying at his home in Nova Scotia on August 2, 1922. Alone with him in his room was his wife, Mabel. She had been by his side when he was an unknown, penniless teacher, and she was with him now, forty-five years later, as he left the world one of its most famous men. Moments before his death, Mabel, who would survive her husband by only six months, whispered to Alec, “Don’t leave me.” Unable to speak, he answered her by pressing her fingers with two of his own—sign language, their language, for “no.”

Like Bell, Joseph Lister would live a long life, long enough to see his ideas not only vindicated, but venerated. Over the years, he would be given his country’s most distinguished honors—from being knighted by Queen Victoria in 1882, to being made a baron by William Gladstone a year later, to being named one of the twelve original members of the Order of Merit, established in 1902 by Edward VII, Victoria’s son, to recognize extraordinary achievement. What Lister valued above all else, however, was the knowledge that doctors around the world now practiced antiseptic surgery, and that their patients had a far greater hope of keeping their limbs, and their lives. “I must confess that, highly, and very highly, as I esteem the honors that have been conferred upon me,” he would say later in life, “I regard all worldly distinctions as nothing in comparison with the hope that I may have been the means of reducing in some degree the sum of human misery.”

Long before his death at the age of eighty-four, Lister would be recognized as “the greatest conqueror of disease the world has ever seen.” Nowhere, however, was his contribution to science, and to the welfare of all humankind, appreciated more than in the United States, a country that had once dismissed his theory at tremendous cost. In 1902, more than twenty years after Garfield’s death, the American ambassador to England would give a speech at the Royal Society in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Lister’s doctorate.

“My lord,” the ambassador said, addressing Lister as he sat in an opulent hall, surrounded by powerful men and celebrated scientists, “it is not a profession, it is not a nation, it is humanity itself which, with uncovered head, salutes you.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It does not take much exposure to the vast and rich collection of Garfield’s papers and artifacts to understand that our twentieth president was not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man. The story of his remarkable life and brutal murder is told in heartbreaking detail in hundreds of diary entries, letters, and personal artifacts—a historical treasure trove that would have been lost long ago were it not for the exceptional skill and devotion of the men and women who are the keepers of our nation’s great archives.

While researching this book, every time I visited one of these archives I found largely forgotten items that, more than a century after Garfield’s death, brought him suddenly and vividly to life. At the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., I was shown the lead bullet, smooth and flattened by the impact with Garfield’s body, that Guiteau shot from his .44 caliber gun on the morning of July 2, 1881. At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, I held in my gloved hands the section of Garfield’s spine which that bullet had pierced. At the National Museum of American History, I had the great honor of being able to closely examine the many versions of Alexander Graham Bell’s induction balance—in various shapes and sizes, with hanging wires and unfinished edges—that Bell had designed and built in the Volta Laboratory in a desperate attempt to save the president’s life.

In the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, I would like to thank Lia Apodaca, Fred Augustyn, Jennifer Brathodue, Patrick Kerwin, Bruce Kirby, and Joseph Jackson, with special thanks to Jeff Flannery, who patiently and kindly answered my many questions. At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, I am grateful to Kathleen Stocker, assistant archivist; Brian Spatola, anatomical collections; and, especially, the museum’s chief archivist, Michael Rhode. Michael made all my research there possible, helped me find items I never would have found without his guidance, and introduced me to one of my most valued scientific advisers.

I was very fortunate to spend much of my research time at the National Museum of American History. David Haberstitch, the incredibly knowledgeable curator of photographs in the Archives Center, helped me track down the unpublished memoirs of Charles Sumner Tainter, Bell’s assistant, who played a critical role in helping to build the induction balance. Judy Chelnick, associate curator in the museum’s Division of Medicine and Science, first told me about the various versions of the induction balance, which Bell donated to the museum in 1898, and then made arrangements for me to see them for myself. Judy also introduced me to Roger Sherman, also an associate curator in the Division of Medicine and Science, who patiently explained to me how the induction balance, in all its many manifestations, worked. Roger has a genius not only for understanding even the most complicated and arcane historical scientific instruments, but for explaining them in a way that others too might understand. I will be forever grateful for his help.

I also had the pleasure of doing a great deal of research in Ohio, my home state, and was extremely impressed with the libraries and archives I visited there. At Hiram College—known as the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute when Garfield was one of its students and teachers, and, later, its president—Jennifer Morrow, the college archivist, was unfailingly helpful, both while I was in the library, doing general research, and later, when I asked for her help in finding specific items long-distance. She always worked with astonishing speed, and found exactly what I was looking for. The Western Reserve Historical Society also has a large collection of Garfield papers, and I would like to thank reference supervisor Ann Sindelar for her generous help. Many thanks also go to the very knowledgeable guides at Lawnfield, Garfield’s beloved farmhouse, which is now a National Historic Site. I would strongly encourage anyone visiting the area to stop and see it. It is fascinating and beautifully preserved.

Thanks also go to Richard Tuske, director of the library for the New York City Bar; Anne Thacher, library director of the Stonington Historical Society; Dale Sauter, manuscript curator of the special collections department at East Carolina University; William Bushong at the White House Historical Association; Kathie Pohl, director of marketing and community relations for the City of Mentor; Mary Kramer at Lakeview Cemetery; Kathryn Murphy at the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf; and the staff of the Chicago Historical Society.

For help in understanding Garfield’s physical condition after the shooting and his autopsy report, I am very grateful to Dr. Paul Uhlig, who generously shared his time and exceptional knowledge. For advice on the science behind the induction balance, I would like to thank David Deatherage, an electrical engineer at Pearson Kent McKinley Raaf Engineers. For sending me a copy of his fine article about the medical aspects related to Garfield’s shooting, thanks go to Dr. Ibrahim Eltorai. I am also, and especially, deeply grateful to Dr. Dave Edmond Lounsbury, a brilliant internist who spent months answering my countless questions and pointing out details relating to Garfield’s condition and care that I had overlooked. Dave also read and reviewed every chapter in this book.

I would also like to thank those scholars who devoted many years of their lives to studying and writing about Garfield. I am grateful to Kenneth Ackerman for his compelling book
Dark Horse
, to Ira Rutkow for
James A. Garfield
in the American Presidents Series, and to John Shaw, both for his insightful biography of Lucretia Garfield and for his careful reading and editing of James and Lucretia’s letters to each other, which he compiled into a moving and illuminating book. I am indebted to Harry Garfield’s daughter, Lucretia Garfield Comer, who wrote
Harry Garfield’s First Forty Years
, and to Ruth Feis, Mollie Garfield’s daughter, author of
Mollie Garfield in the White House
, for their beautifully written books, which give the kind of insight into Garfield’s life that could come only from the members of his family. Finally, I am especially grateful to Alan Peskin, who, with his book
Garfield
, wrote what is, in my opinion, the definitive Garfield biography. I had the great pleasure to meet Alan in Cleveland, and he generously shared with me his own impressions of Garfield, after having spent a quarter of a century studying him.

Among the most enjoyable experiences I had while researching this book was the time I spent with several of Garfield’s descendants. There is no doubt in my mind that James Garfield would have been exceptionally proud of the fine family that grew out of his marriage to Lucretia. The president’s descendants—from great-grandchildren to great-great-great-grandchildren—were every bit as warm and kind as their famous forefather is remembered to have been. I would especially like to thank James A. Garfield III, known as Jay, who, along with his mother, Sally, and brother, Tom, generously invited me to a delicious, fascinating, and very fun family dinner. I will never forget their kindness and hospitality, or the wonderful stories they told. I am also very grateful to Rudolph Garfield, known as Bob, who shared with me details of his family’s history as well as memories of his grandfather James, who had been in the train station with his father, President Garfield, on that fateful day. I would also like to thank Wyatt Garfield, whom I interviewed over the phone, and Jill Driscoll, Mollie Garfield’s great-great-granddaughter, who kindly sent me a copy of the treatise that her father, a physician, wrote about the medical care Garfield received after the shooting.

For help with tracking down elusive newspaper articles, many thanks go to my very smart, resourceful friend Stacy Benson. I am grateful to Lora Uhlig for spending several painful weekends copying the nearly three thousand pages of the trial record of
United States v. Guiteau
. Thanks too to David Uhlig and Clif Wiens for helping me to understand and navigate the world of social media. I am grateful to Michelle Harris for applying her impressive and abundant research skills toward fact-checking this book. For stirring in me an early interest in history and the world outside our hometown, I would like to thank my lifelong friend Jodi Lewis. For her great warmth and kindness to my family, I will always be grateful to Betty Jacobs.

As a writer, I am extremely fortunate to have a brilliant editor in Bill Thomas, an extraordinary agent in Suzanne Gluck, and an incredibly talented publicist in Todd Doughty. I would like to thank them not only for the time and talent they have devoted to this book, but for their kindness and encouragement.

Many thanks and much love to my parents, Lawrence and Constance Millard, to whom this book is dedicated; my sisters, Kelly Sandvig, Anna Shaffer, and Nichole Millard; my mother-in-law, Doris Uhlig; and my bright, sweet, funny, precious-beyond-words children, Emery Millard Uhlig, Petra Tihen Uhlig, and Conrad Adams Uhlig.

My husband, Mark Uhlig, has been a constant source of encouragement, inspiration, and pure happiness for the past nearly twenty years of my life. He deserves more thanks than I could possibly fit into a thousand books, much less one, so I carry them all in my heart.
A tu lado.

Finally, over the years I spent writing this book, my family and I have learned firsthand how fortunate we are to live in a time when medical science has advanced in the treatment not just of bullet wounds and infections, but of diseases as mysterious and insidious as cancer. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Gerald Woods, Cathy Burks, Dr. Brian Kushner, Dr. Margaret Smith, Lynn Hathaway, and Dr. Edward Belzer, as well as the many exceptional men and women at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. From the bottom of this mother’s heart, and on behalf of every member of my family, thank you, thank you, thank you.