There is an obvious interest in nature, but of the birds and animals that figure in the running chronicle, it is the bear that has the strongest fascination—a dancing bear at Lake Windermere, a game of “wild bears and hunting” with Conie and Ellie in the park at London and again at the Tuileries in Paris, a bear clock that he sees in a shop at Bern. At Florence he takes pad and pencil to the zoo to do a drawing of a bear.
Another entry made at Florence, a mention of a visit to “Mr. Elliot’s where we saw a beautiful book of birds written by him,” is of particular interest, since this was Daniel Giraud Elliot, the great American ornithologist whose collection of bird specimens, the finest collection then extant, was about to be acquired by the new American Museum of Natural History. Daniel Elliot was tall and bearded and enormously dignified. As a child he too had been “delicate in health.”
The manner at times is wonderfully pompous. It is easy to imagine the response had he so expressed himself among other American boys his age. At the end of the day at Oxford he writes, “I had a headache and Conie and Ellie made a tremendous noise playing at my expense and rather laughed when I remonstrated. . . .” He declares of the route to Genoa, “this railroad is an abomination.” The standard word of approval is “splendid” and once in Florence he is forced to excuse himself from play in order to “arrange my pantaloons.”
That he was enjoying himself the large proportion of the time, and nearly always when his health was right, is apparent throughout. Page after page he is having “fine fun,” “a great play,” “great fun.” There are touches of humor (”We are to write all our letters four pages, so much the worse for our friends!”) and one surprising, pleasurable moment at Ellie’s birthday party in Rome when he is kissed by a little girl named Elliese Van Schaack “as the boy she loved best in the room.”
This memorable account of a battle that took place on the Pincian Hill in Rome is from the entry of January 15, 1870:
We had a splendid day today. Ellie went out to get a sword and gun and I went to Mrs. Dickey’s for Charlie. Going back . . . we met Ellie with gun and sword. He lent the gun to Charlie and I picked up some stones. I was a little rebellious soldier. Ellie struck me with his sword. We then got for my weapons a club and two javelins. We then encamped and as I was sentinel, I revenged the blows of the sword by running away. I ran to a small hillock of dust and caves and took my stand. Up they came and Charlie made at me with the gun and cut my hand with it. I struck him in the chest and he fell on his back. But Ellie was on me with his sword and had me on my knees but I hurled him on Charlie. I saw, however, that I would be beaten in another battle and I rushed down a steep hill and when we fought again I defeated them and rushed up to another position and again encountered and beat them. They were now forced to receive me as an honored soldier.
But the same honored soldier plays dolls and “baby” with Conie, and he can be withered by the least sign of disapproval or ridicule. One entire evening at Nice is written off as “miserable” because “Papa called us children bothers. . . .”
At supper [another night] Mama laughed at me a great deal and made fun of me because I always say “Pretty Papa, Pretty Mama” and made me feel (and I feel now) very cut and ashamed of myself and I don’t feel natural, though Mama and Papa both tried to make it up when they saw what she had done.
On being told that his Uncle Weir Roosevelt is dead, he turns to the diary and writes, “It is the third relation that has died in my short life. What will come?”
Best by far are the “fine sociable times” with Papa and Mama. “We went in the cars and had a tremendous play with Mama.” “I and Mama and Papa had a sociable time by the fire with my stampbook.” “Papa and I had a jolly walk.” “In the evening Mama told us incidents of her early life and adventures of my ancestors. . . .” “I had such nice real tea for supper and such a nice time we did have, especially Mama and I who petted each other up. . . . Did I say I had real tea.”
Mama is all-comforting, never angry. Papa leads the way. Papa makes the rules; Papa gives out the spending money and requires an accounting of how it is used. Papa, dressed for the Vienna Opera, is “more handsome than I ever saw him.” In a crowd at St. Peter’s, as the family waits for a glimpse of the Pope, a monk shoves Teedie out of the way and Papa springs forward to fling the man aside. Papa gives “a grand dinner” at the hotel in Rome and invites “22 persons!!!”
On a few occasions Papa appears not to have been at his best. He seems to step strangely out of character. In the entry for January 4, 1870, we are told how Papa tossed pennies to a crowd of beggar children outside Naples, but that when one child “transgressed” some rule Papa had made, Papa whipped him “till he cried.” (It was immediately following this incident, interestingly, that he presented Teedie with the Roman vase and coin.) Another time, surrounded by a horde of half-starved Italian women and children, Papa bought baskets of cake. “We tossed the cakes to them,” Teedie writes,”... fed them like chickens with small pieces, and like chickens they ate it. . . . We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it.” This was all great fun, according to Teedie. Papa was a marvel. “We made the crowds . . . give three cheers for the U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.”
Bamie is “such a kind sister,” but remains part of the adult world, more like a second mother. Ellie is “the chief” or “captain” in their games. Conie remains his favorite playmate.
Still, there runs a theme, a mounting refrain really, of the pleasure and pride in being the first to see or do something, an eagerness to set himself apart from the others, to distinguish himself, to get out ahead of them; or simply to be alone, absorbed in private thoughts. It begins as early as the shipboard friendship with Mr. St. John, which he had managed entirely on his own and in his own fashion. “I was the first one that got on the continent,” he writes of the landing at Antwerp. “I walked with Papa before the rest most of the way,” he says of their hike out of Switzerland over the Splügen Pass. On a September day beside Lake Como he sits in a shaded woodland “with no sound save the waterfall and the Italian breeze on my cheek. I all alone am writing my journal.” “I began my ascent of the snow-covered Vesuvius,” he writes the last day of 1869. “I soon passed the rest and left them far behind.”
For Mittie, it may well have been the happiest year of her life. To judge by Teedie’s account she was never once ill or even out of sorts. Ironically, she appears to have been the only one of the family who never took sick, who never missed a day.
Italy had thrilled her. She had led the children through one museum after another, often plunking one or the other of them before a favorite painting or piece of sculpture: “Now, darling, this is one of the greatest works of art in the world, and I am going to leave you here alone for five minutes, because I want you to sit very quietly and look at it. . .”
Arriving in Paris the second time, in early March 1870, she could still write glowingly of sights yet to be seen. “I have only been once inside the Louvre,” she told Anna. “We are going to commence vigorously this week, it is so fascinating.”
For reasons that remain obscure, it had also been decided that Bamie would stay on in Paris. She was to be put in the hands of Mile. Marie Souvestre, headmistress of Les Ruches, a private school for girls in Fontainebleau, outside Paris. Then in her mid-thirties, with a long, distinguished career ahead of her, the remarkable Mile. Souvestre was a woman of singular poise and great culture, but also an outspoken agnostic, and this, in view of Theodore’s feelings on religion, makes the decision a little puzzling and suggests that Mittie may have had the final say. In any event, a first visit to Fontainebleau to see the school was made March 19, and as brief as Bamie’s time there would be, Mile. Souvestre’s influence would carry far.
In one respect only had the year been a failure. Teedie’s health, far from improving, had been conspicuously wretched throughout, as his amazing diary also reveals. From what he writes and from observations and clues to be found in family corr
espondence, the year can also be seen as a substantial medical profile of a very sick little boy whose case was by no means simple.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Disease of the Direst Suffering
1
BRONCHIAL ASTHMA is among the most serious of childhood afflictions—baffling, capricious, expensive, and, in its acute stages, terrifying. It is also a family affliction and a severe one, which is something seldom understood by those who have never lived with an asthmatic child, for rarely does anyone beyond the immediate family or the medical profession see an actual attack or have any idea of the suffering involved. The child known by the outside world is the child between attacks who appears to have little or nothing the matter with him, who can play and carry on like most any healthy youngster, even hike twenty miles in the Alps. It is only those closest to him who know how tenuous such intervals are. For the parents it is “living with a time bomb.” The attacks, when they come, are a shattering, numbing experience—always, no matter how many times it has happened before. Nights are made a shambles, sleep is lost, nerves are frayed. Parents become intensely wary of anything that might bring on an attack. They grow increasingly protective, often engulfing in their good intentions. And if, as the years go by, the child shows no improvement, they begin feeling desperate and depleted; they see themselves caught in the grip of something altogether beyond comprehension and their ability to cope. Some mothers “just about go crazy” with worry.
On the third day of October 1869, her fifth day in Vienna, Mittie Roosevelt sat in the garden at the Schönbrunn Palace, writing still another long letter to her sister. Again that morning, as in London, it had been necessary for Theodore to rush Teedie out of the city for a “change of air.” By this point in their married life, she and Theodore had been living with Teedie’s asthma for about seven years.
This morning Thee and Teedie left us immediately after breakfast to spend the day and sleep tonight at [Bad] Voslau, an hour by rail from Vienna. Teedie . . . seems hardly to have three or four days’ complete exemption and keeps us constantly uneasy and on the stretch. For instance on Lake Como . . . it came to a point where he had to sit up in bed to breathe. After a strong cup of black coffee the spasmodic part of the attack ceased and he slept; consequently woke up partly restored. Had the coffee not taken effect, he would have gone on struggling through the night. . . . Thee had warded off one or two attacks with this coffee, but likes to keep it for our trump card. . . . On Saturday was exactly the fortnight since we reached Venice. These entire two weeks he has had nothing but diarrhea and threats of asthma . . . and this morning, as I said, they have gone out of the city for this little change of air. We had almost every day lovely weather in Venice and these few days in Vienna cloudless blue skies and soft breeze. So what it is that keeps up the attacks is a mystery.
How conversant she and Theodore were with the latest medical theories on asthma, what medical advice they were getting, we may only speculate; but their concern for health being what it was and given the frequent contact they had with physicians—Hilborne West, Charles Fayette Taylor, John Metcalfe, the family doctor—they probably knew as much as did any parents of that day. And while it is true that enormous strides have since been made in pulmonary medicine, the things then perceived were neither trivial nor tangential. Asthma had been recognized as a definitive clinical disease for more than a century. A hereditary tendency, the fact that there is a “genetic predisposition” to asthma, had been noted. A seasonal pattern was perceived by many physicians. Certain foods, certain odors, bed feathers, house dust, cat fur, as well as abrupt changes in temperature or humidity, were cited as specific irritants that could bring on an asthmatic “fit” and patients were advised accordingly.
Equally impressive was the mounting body of opinion that the key lay somewhere in the “neurotic character of the complaint.” The first experimental work on the psychological factors in asthma was not to come until the 1880s. Freud and his revelations concerning the unconscious world were further still in the future. But the idea that asthma might be somehow connected with the emotions was very old—allegedly Hippocrates had warned, “The asthmatic must guard against anger”—and from the early part of the nineteenth century increasing numbers of physicians had become convinced that states of grief, anger, joy, “nervous influences” or “passions of the mind” played a more important part than heretofore reckoned.
The fact that an asthmatic’s lungs may be quite “perfect”—as the doctor in London found Teedie’s lungs to be—had been determined as early as 1819 by the famous French physician René Laënnec, inventor of the stethoscope, who perceived no organic causes to which asthma could be attributed but listed “mental emotion” among the primary probable causes.
“A preternaturally nervous . . . temperament, if not the cause, wonderfully favors the attack of asthma,” wrote an American doctor named Joshua Bicknell Chapin in 1843. “Extreme nervous irritability not only invites the attack, but aggravates the symptoms and prolongs continuance,” he said, and elucidated on the frustrations of trying to pin down a specific dietary or environmental cause.
What will almost universally relieve one case, will as assuredly induce a paroxysm in another. Ordinarily the air of low situations is more congenial than mountain breezes. . . . Some suffer in a certain room, but are immediately relieved if removed to an opposite room in the same house. One cannot sleep or rest in one street, or lane, but slumbers quietly if removed to another part of the same village or city. Another can breathe freely if he can only be allowed to sit in a room filled with smoke to suffocation, but pure air is almost intolerable. . . . While one is benefited by a journey in the country, another will find more relief in the contaminated atmosphere of the densest mart. . . . Most will avoid a crowded assembly as they would a pesthouse; but I have a friend who always resorts to such a place when practicable, for a moment of private breathing.
All such cases, he surmised, “owed their origin to certain mental impressions, or emotions.”
In 1864, or two years after the infant Teedie’s asthma had begun, a highly important work was published in Philadelphia, a book of 256 pages titled On Asthma. The author was an English physician, Henry Hyde Salter, a very keen observer who as the father of an asthmatic child had “experienced the horrors” of the disease. Like Laënnec, Salter had found no abnormalities in the lungs of his asthmatic patients, no trace of the disease in either the respiratory or circulatory system, and hence concluded that the trouble lay in the nervous system. Asthma, a disease of “the direst suffering,” a disease “about whose pathology more various and discrepant ideas prevail than any other,” was “essentially a nervous disease.”
Sudden “mental emotion,” Salter said, could both bring on an attack and abruptly end one. He did not know why, only what he had observed. He reported on a patient whose attack ceased the moment he saw a fire outside the window and another who had his asthma stop when put on a fast horse. Still other patients found that as soon as they neared the doctor’s office their asthma vanished, “suddenly and without any apparent cause except the mental perturbation at being within the precincts of the physician.” The onset of an attack, he noted, was frequently preceded by a spell of depression or “heaviness” (what Teedie called feeling “doleful”), and twenty years in advance of what might be regarded as the first studies in the psychosomatic side of asthma he reported on a small boy who “found his disease a convenient immunity from correction.”
“Don’t scold me,” he would say, if he had incurred his fathers displeasure, “or I shall have the asthma.” And so he would; his fears were as correct as they were convenient.
The nature of an actual attack was described by Salter in accurate, vivid detail and with considerable sympathy for anyone who had to try to deal with the situation. Specific kinds of treatment were described, including the “beneficial influence of sustained bodily exertion.” It was the most comprehensive study on asthma that had as yet appeared, the defini
tive word, and either Hilborne West, Taylor, Metcalfe, or all three, must have known about it and so consequently would the Roosevelts, in part if not in whole. Much of what Salter wrote on the importance of exercise reads as if it might have been the very text for all Theodore was to preach to his small son and that the son himself would choose as his own lifelong creed. “Organs are made for action, not existence; they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well,” insisted Dr. Salter.
The common methods then used to confront an attack varied greatly and to the present-day reader seem excessively harsh. Emetics and purges were standard. The common way to avert an attack was to make the patient violently ill, to dose him with ipecac or with incredibly nauseating potions made of garlic and mustard seed and “vinegar of squills,” a dried plant also used for rat poison. Children were given enemas, plunged into cold baths. Whiskey and gin were used, laudanum (opium mixed with wine) and Indian hemp (marijuana). The patient was made to inhale chloroform or the fumes of burning nitrate paper or the smoke from dried jimson weed (Datura stramonium), another poisonous plant, coarse and vile smelling, that had been used in treating asthma in India for centuries. Many children were made to smoke a ghastly medicinal cigarette concocted of jimson weed and chopped camphor.
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