The Greater Journey

by David McCullough

  Once, on a street in Rome, when a religious procession passed and Morse failed to remove his hat, a soldier, one of the cardinal’s guards, had knocked it off with his gun, cursing him as il diavolo. Thinking about it later, Morse decided he could not blame the soldier, only a religion that would resort to such force.

  In addition to aristocrats, soldiers, and priests, he chose not to include any representation of upper-middle-class Paris, the numerous bourgeois, or the many European tourists who comprised such a substantial part of the regular flow of visitors. As he had included only his pick of the more than a thousand paintings in the museum’s collection, so, too, the clientele was limited to his personal preferences.

  Nor did he provide the least sign or hint of the deadly scourge then raging outside the museum or the inner torment of the figure at center stage. Instead there is a feeling of great security and well-being. Far from cold or threatening, the painting glows with warmth, in the Salon’s deep red walls, and promise, in the gleam of sunshine from the skylights down the vaulted Gallery.

  Cooper had been on hand through the whole effort, keeping Morse company. “He is with me two or three hours at the gallery (the hours of his relaxation) every day as regularly as the day comes,” Morse reported to his brothers in mid-July when more than 200 people a day were dying of cholera.

  Shortly afterward Cooper and family departed for an extended sojourn in Germany and Switzerland, relieved to put Paris behind them at last. Ever the faithful correspondent, Cooper would write frequently to Morse, to describe the sights he and the family were seeing and the improvement in Susan Cooper’s health. He hoped Morse would not leave Paris until the following spring, so they could all sail home together.

  But Morse had made up his mind. By the time the Coopers returned to Paris in mid-October, Morse was gone. His work at the Louvre at an end, his affairs settled, and having paid an emotional farewell to Lafayette, he sailed from Le Havre on the American packet Sully on October 6. The Gallery of the Louvre was stowed securely belowdecks.

  IV

  But Morse was taking something of more importance home with him— an idea inspired by a system used outside of Paris to send overland messages, a semaphore apparatus that used mechanically operated arms or flaps from atop tall towers spaced six miles apart. Messages were read by telescope. This served well enough in clear weather, but not in fog, rain, or at night. For this French system the word “telegraph” had first come into use.

  Morse would later say his first mention of the possibility of an electric telegraph took place during the voyage home on the Sully. He would recall “the manner, the place, and the moment when the thought of making an electric wire the means of communicating intelligence first came into my mind and was uttered.” But according to Cooper and his family, Morse had talked frequently of the idea during their evenings together through the spring of 1832, months before Morse ever left Paris. “I confess I thought the notion evidently chimerical, and as such spoke of it in my family,” Cooper would later tell Morse. “I always set you down as a sober-minded, common-sense sort of a fellow, and thought it a high flight for a painter to make to go off on the wings of the lightning.”

  Richard Habersham, too, would remember passing the evening in the rooms they shared listening to Morse go on about the French telegraph being too slow, and that on the invitation of a French authority Morse had gone to examine the French system at close hand.

  I recollect also [Habersham wrote] that in our frequent visits to Mr. J. Fenimore Cooper’s in the rue Saint-Dominique, these subjects, so interesting to Americans, were often introduced, and that Morse seemed to harp on them. …

  But whenever Morse began talking about an electric telegraph—and the question would later become a matter of importance—there was no doubt the germ of the idea had taken hold of him in France. Assuredly, neither Habersham nor Cooper and his family would have said so had it not been true.

  By the summer of 1833 in New York, Morse had completed the final touches on The Gallery of the Louvre. On August 9, he wrote to Cooper, “My picture, c’est fini.” It went on public view in the second-floor gallery of the well-known bookstore Carvill & Company, at Broadway and Pine Street. The charge for admission was 25 cents.

  The reviews were respectful, complimentary, even enthusiastic. “Every artist and connoisseur was charmed with it,” wrote the critic William Dunlap. “Here shine in one grand constellation, the brilliant effusions of those great names destined to live as long as the art of painting exists,” declared the NewYork Mirror.

  We do not know which most to admire, in contemplating this magnificent design, the courage which could undertake such a Herculean task, or the perseverance and success with which it has been completed.

  We have never seen anything of the kind before in this country. Its effect on us is different from that made by any other painting. …

  We may truly congratulate the country that such a collection is in its possession. We can say with a friend of ours, a distinguished artist who has never been in Europe, that we never had an idea of the old masters until we saw Morse’s picture of the Louvre.

  The public, however, showed little interest. As a commercial venture, the painting was no more a success than Morse’s House of Representatives had been.

  Eventually it was bought by a man named George Hyde Clarke, who lived near Cooper’s old home on Otsego Lake and whose portrait Morse had painted before leaving for France. The purchase price was $1,300. Morse had hoped to get $2,500.

  That The Gallery of the Louvre would one day, in 1982, be purchased for a museum in Chicago for $3,250,000, the highest sum ever paid until then for a work by an American artist, would in Morse’s time have been unimaginable.

  Cooper and his family left Paris in the spring of 1833. They had been away from home longer than intended—for the younger children more than half a lifetime. But none ever regretted the time in Paris. Cooper had written eight novels since leaving home, and privately he talked now of calling a halt to his writing. But there would be much more to come, including Gleanings in Europe, devoted to his experiences and observations in France, and two more immensely popular Natty Bumppo tales, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, the latter of which many considered his masterpiece.

  It had been seven years since Cooper and the family set sail for France from New York and the man on a passing ship had called out ominously, “You will never come back.” Now he was on his way back, and he wanted to go. Unlike Morse, he was never to see Paris again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE MEDICALS

  It is no trifle to be a medical student in Paris.

  —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

  I

  Like all great cities, Paris was a composite of many worlds within, each going about its particular, preoccupying ways quite independent, or seemingly independent, of the others. As notable as any of these worlds, and of far-reaching importance, was Paris Médicale, the Paris of numerous hospitals and illustrious physicians, of medical technicians, nurses, interns, and patients numbering in the many thousands; a celebrated medical school, the École de Médecine, and several thousand students from every part of France and much of the world.

  This, too, was Paris—their Paris for those caught up in it— unmistakably different from fashionable Paris, or political Paris, intellectual Paris, financial Paris, or the visitor’s Paris, not to say the Paris pictured in the minds of so many who had never been there, or the Paris of the desperately poor.

  The population of medical Paris equaled that of a small city, and included every variety of humankind, virtually every known ailment and affliction, much suffering—suffering sometimes relieved, often not—and a constant presence of death. Much about the standard procedures in the hospitals and surgical amphitheaters was, to the uninitiated, revolting, and among some of the celebrated performers of such procedures, professional rivalries and jealousies flourished as much as within any opera company.

  It was not a closed w
orld. Visitors were welcome to nearly all of it, and more often than not what they saw, the dedication and kindness of the nurses, the orderliness and scale of the care given, seemed everything that could be desired. As a place to learn, it had no equal, and with all its components it was as proud an achievement as any Paris could claim.

  Largest of the hospitals was the Hôtel Dieu, an immense five-story pile of a building that stood by Notre-Dame on the Île-de-la-Cité—on the square, or parvis, of Notre-Dame (to the right as one faced the cathedral), its back to the Seine. Founded in 1602, it was the oldest hospital in Paris and possibly in all Europe. Its only claim to architectural distinction was an entrance foyer with Doric columns approached by a broad three-sided stone stairway. An annex nearly as large as the main building stood directly behind, on the other side of the river, the two buildings connected by a covered bridge.

  This one hospital, with 1,400 beds, served more than 15,000 patients a year, and as in all Paris hospitals, patients were treated free of charge.

  Second in size of the general hospitals and more beautifully situated was the Hôpital de la Pitié, which faced the Jardin des Plantes, a short distance away on the other side of the Seine. It had 800 beds, and while the Hôtel Dieu was considered preeminent in surgery, La Pitié was known for its clinical medicine and particularly for the treatment of diseases of the chest such as tuberculosis.

  The Hôpital de la Charité, also on the Left Bank, was half-again smaller and timeworn in appearance, but much on a par with the other two and distinguished by several acclaimed physicians especially popular among the medical students. La Charité stood on the narrow rue Jacob, almost directly across the street from one of the most important historic sites in American history, the Hôtel d’York, where in 1783, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay had signed the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the Revolutionary War. But few of the American medical students seemed aware of this.

  The Hôpital des Enfants Malades, on the rue de Sèvres, was the first children’s hospital in the world. The immense Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, founded originally for beggars in the seventeenth century and built on what had been a site for making saltpeter, was an asylum for indigent and deranged women. For indigent and deranged men, there was the larger Hôpital de Bicêtre on a hill well to the south. The Hôpital Saint-Louis, in the northeastern part of Paris, had been built by King Henry IV to combat the plague. A handsome complex of brick and stone pavilions with the look of a château, it served now as a hospital for diseases of the skin, the first of its kind anywhere.

  In the single year of 1833, the year following the cholera epidemic, a total of twelve Paris hospitals provided treatment for 65,935 patients. In Boston, by comparison, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the McLean Hospital together cared for fewer than 800 patients.

  The Hôtel Dieu, La Pitié, and La Charité, all within walking distance of each other, in combination with the nearby École de Médecine, formed the heart of medical Paris. Here, at these three hospitals primarily, as well as the medical school, the great luminaries of French medicine, many of international reputation, held forth in the lecture halls and allowed students to accompany them as they made their rounds of the patients in the wards.

  Auguste-François Chomel was a leading clinical physician whose bedside comments during his morning rounds at the Hôtel Dieu attracted a large following. Guillaume Dupuytren held the supreme position of chief surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu. Alfred-Armand-Louise-Marie Velpeau, who lectured at La Charité and the École de Médecine, wrote the treatise on surgery used by most students and was considered a surpassing example of a man who by merit and hard work had risen from obscure beginnings to the forefront of his profession. Velpeau, as everyone knew, was the son of a blacksmith.

  Philippe Ricord was a noted specialist in syphilis and one of the few medical professors who spoke English. Gabriel Andral lectured at the École on internal pathology and, in the view of many students, was the most eloquent professor of them all. Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis, though neither eloquent nor especially popular, was to have the greatest influence on the American students. Louis stood foremost in insisting on evidence—facts—as essential to diagnosis and was greatly admired as the best man in Paris with a stethoscope.

  Compared to the hospitals, the magnificent École de Médecine on the rue de l’École de Médecine was brand-new. Its cornerstone had been laid in 1776, less than sixty years earlier. It was neoclassical in the grand manner, and enormous. Its central amphitheater for lectures seated nearly a thousand. There were exhibits, a library, everything open to all.

  A public institution, the École was a showpiece of French education. In the time since the Revolution of 1789, opportunities for a medical education had been made available to a degree unimaginable earlier, the profession of medicine opened to all qualified young men irrespective of wealth or background. The social position of one’s family no longer mattered, as the surgeon Velpeau’s career testified.

  In the spirit of opening wide the door, French, not Latin, had been made the language of instruction. A college education, or equivalent, was required for admission, as was not the case at American medical schools, but foreign students at the École did not have to meet this requirement. Further, for foreign students, including Americans, there was no tuition. For them, as at the Sorbonne, the lectures were free.

  Nothing in the United States remotely compared to the École de Médecine. Medical education in America at the time was barely under way. There were still, in the 1830s, only twenty-one medical schools in the United States, or on average not even one per state, and these were small, with faculties of only five or six professors. Most aspiring physicians in America never attended medical school but learned by apprenticing themselves to “respectable” practitioners, most of whom had been poorly trained. In his novel The Pioneers, Cooper described the medical apprenticeship of a character named Elnathan Todd, said to have been based on a real-life doctor in Cooperstown. Though the setting of the story was earlier in the nineteenth century, and the portrayal a bit exaggerated, the education for “doctoring” had improved little in many parts of the country.

  [At about age eighteen] the lad was removed to the house of the village doctor, a gentleman whose early career had not been unlike that of our hero, where he was often seen, sometimes watering the horse, at others watering medicines. … This kind of life continued for a twelvemonth, when he suddenly appeared at meeting in a long coat … and a few months later was called for the first time in his life, Doctor Todd. …

  At the École de Médecine, a faculty of twenty-six delivered lectures on Anatomy, Physiology, Physics, Medical Hygiene, Medical Natural History, Accouchements (birth), Surgical Pathology, Pharmacology and Organic Chemistry, Medical Pathology, Therapeutics, Pathological Anatomy, Operative Surgery, Clinical Surgery, Clinical Medicine, Clinical Midwifery, Diseases of Women and Children, and Legal Medicine.

  Enrollment was as high as 5,000 students, or approximately twice the number of students then in all medical schools in the United States. The American students at the École in the 1830s and ’40s were but a tiny part of enrollment, numbering only 30 to 50 annually.

  For those American students newly arrived in Paris, the prospect of entering such a world was exciting and unnerving, quite apart from the considerable problem of language. Some hesitated, putting it off as long as possible, knowing, as one wrote, it would be a “new world from the circle of which it will be difficult to escape when once I am in it.”

  But then once “in it,” most of them wanted only to stay longer than they originally intended. During his first days, Ashbel Smith had stressed in letters home that his “attachment” to America could never be diminished, and that he had every intention of returning soon to North Carolina. Within a month, he was confiding to a cousin, “I dislike to fix the time of my departure. I shall protract it as long as possible.”

  James Jackson, Jr., who had left Paris for the British Isle
s after serving in the cholera wards, was, when he returned in the fall of 1832, jubilant to be back. Nothing he had seen in the hospitals of London, Dublin, and Edinburgh had caused him to reconsider his high opinion of medical Paris. The grandeur of the École, he felt, was the grandeur of great minds. A lecture he attended, soon after his return, was the most thrilling he had ever heard. “The glory of the week has been Andral’s introductory lecture on diseases of the brain,” he wrote to his father. “What powers of mind and vastness of comprehension has this man!”

  Jackson’s Boston friend Mason Warren, one of the new arrivals, would describe himself later as having been “a perfect ignoramus” in the life of the world into which he was entering, and feeling “quite overwhelmed.” With Jackson and another Bostonian, Henry Bowditch, Warren had found a place to live on the narrow, upward-sloping rue Monsieur-le-Prince. Shortly after, Wendell Holmes moved in on the same street near the top of the rise. Holmes described his room on the uppermost floor of a five-story house as having three windows and a view, a tile floor, and a “very nice” green carpet. The furniture included a bed, a marble-topped bureau, a mahogany table, two mirrors, two armchairs, and an ink stand, all of which cost him 40 francs a month, or about $8, which was average. A “little extra” went to the porter who woke him in the morning, made the bed, washed his clothes, and polished his boots. With the apartment only a few blocks from the École and his route on the rue Monsieur- le-Prince all downhill, Holmes found he could make it to his first lecture in under four minutes door-to-door.