It was not as desperate a remedy as it sounds. Dr Guthrie wrote in his published lectures that people were mistaken in imagining the eye to be very sensitive and delicate and better not touched. The sensitivity is only in the lid, which can be rolled back – ‘Who could bear quietly the sensation which must arise from pushing a needle into the eye if it were analagous to that arising from a fly or a dry solid substance between the eye and the lid? … Few persons can duly estimate the liberties that may be taken with the eye until they have seen several operations performed.’ Guthrie put the insensibility of the eyeball itself down to ‘the benignity of the Creator’. I suspect that Arthur Jacob would have differed on this matter, but otherwise their approach was the same. In middle life, Arthur described his method – no form of anaesthesia was available for any surgery till chloroform and ether appeared, when he was already nearing sixty:
‘I seat the patient in a chair and make him sit straight up or inclining, according to his height. If very tall, I raise myself by standing on a large book or two, or on anything which answers the purpose to be found at hand. [The Jacobs were not tall.] In my own place of business, I find old medical folios answer the purpose well; operating chairs, though very imposing and calculated to produce effect, I have not adopted, not finding myself at ease with such things. When he is seated, I lay the patient’s head against my chest …’
One must suppose that being firmly held to the doctor’s chest had a calming or at any rate subduing effect on some patients. If one winced away, Arthur supplied ‘a word of encouragement or remonstrance’. His procedure must have been generally successful, or he would not have had a steady supply of candidates.
The young French medic who scrounged bodies for his fellow students from La Pitié was allowed twenty francs, something under a pound per month, by his family, but this was just spending money as he lived at home. (He did spend it each month, very rapidly according to him, on gambling.) Balzac’s hard-up young student from the provinces had to pay fifteen francs a month for his small room in ‘one of the poorest and darkest little streets’. Griscom and Sims spent twice that each on their relatively more comfortable rooms, with a sitting room between them, but neither of them was short of money: neither sought work during their lengthy stay in Paris. Arthur, I am sure, did work, in hospital, demonstration theatre or clinic, possibly coaching students himself. With his qualifications and contacts he would have found a niche without too much difficulty.
How long he originally intended to stay I do not know, probably a whole year. But in early March 1815 Napoleon escaped from Elba back to France and began to advance towards Paris, collecting troops as he went, fulfilling the prophecy of one of his less than loyal friends (Fouché) that ‘Spring will bring Bonaparte back to us, with the swallows and the violets.’ When Napoleon reached the capital, he was greeted neither with resistance nor with much jubilation: no one, except the unemployed army officers hanging about in cafés, wanted yet more War, and after the last twelve months, not to mention the last twenty-five years, the Parisians had become cynical about new dawns. Since all was quiet, the foreigners in Paris tended to wait and see – till Napoleon and his reassembled army marched north in June to confront Wellington and his army near Brussels, and it was clear a further great battle would take place. This was to be Waterloo, with Napoleon’s definitive exile to follow, but, fearing it might be a defeat for England, the English hastily made for the Channel, Arthur among them. This time he travelled by diligence, so clearly his sojourn in Paris had left him modestly in funds.
In any case, for an Englishman Paris was not expensive, and this continued to be true for another hundred and twenty years, as generations of expatriates could testify. In 1815 England’s Industrial Revolution and accompanying commercial gains had been advancing for half a century, while France, in today’s terms, was still an underdeveloped country. Sims, passing by a steam engine used for pumping water near the recently laid-out Champs Elysées, remarked that it would ‘disgrace the meanest manufactury in England’. It is true that Sims hailed from Manchester, a world centre of steam power. It was undeniable that, to British eyes, life within old Paris seemed quaint, old-fashioned, almost medieval still; yet at the same time there were sophisticated developments which made it, in some ways, more like a modern city than the London of the time, and certainly more than Edinburgh or Dublin.
A few coffee houses such as the Procope had flourished throughout the eighteenth century, but after the Revolution had run its course many new cafés were opened. These were not yet the pavement cafés that would become so characteristic of Paris a generation or so later; they were all indoors and, while open to everyone, became assembly places for specific groups or professions. There was the Café Voltaire on the Place de l’Odéon, just south of the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, where Griscom and Sims liked to go.3 There was another on the corner by the Ecoles and the Rue Hautefeuille, in an ex-chapel opposite the ancient dwelling with a tower that stands there still: this café was very popular with foreign doctors.
Many restaurants, too, had opened under the Directoire and the Empire, mainly founded by cooks from the great households that had existed before the Revolution and were no more. The whole concept of a restaurant – a ‘restoring place’ – was new then and specifically French. In England, and most other countries, there were only inns to serve travellers or parties gathered there for a special occasion. Otherwise, places to sit down to a meal, outside private houses or guest houses, hardly existed. For Griscom, who was from America but had been touring in Switzerland and Italy, this new French amenity called a restaurant was strange enough for him to describe it:
‘On entering one of the houses and seating oneself at a small table covered with a neat white cloth, a printed paper is presented containing a list of all the varieties which the house affords … The price of so much as an individual ordinarily requires is attached to each article. Hence a person may call for just what he pleases, and pay for no more than he calls for.’
Freedom and sophistication indeed.
Restaurants in Paris existed at a lower economic level also. Some, called gargotes, were shacks catering for labourers working on sites at a distance from their home or lodgings. These were exclusively working class, but the same formula of plain dishes at rock-bottom prices was applied by the famous restaurateur who fed generations of Latin Quarter students, one Flicoteaux. By the end of Napoleon’s empire he and his relations had five or six restaurants in the Quarter, and these are mentioned in novels and memoirs of the era. There was one in the Rue de la Parcheminerie – ‘A big, dim room, tables and benches, no table cloths or napkins; main dishes at 3 to 5 sous [15 to 25 centimes], soup at one sou, not much wine and bring-your-own-bread.’
It was said that a student needed about fifty francs (just over two pounds) a month for food and coffee which, at Flicoteaux prices, sounds adequate. Obviously such establishments could not have run without a pool of extremely cheap labour, and the fact that Parisian labour was so cheap – to cook, to wash dishes, to clear and serve, to cart water in and slops out – explains why even the poorest students never cooked for themselves. It was socially unthinkable for an educated young man to do so, and anyway impracticable.
(This tradition lasted in Paris right through the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth, prolonged through the 1920s and ’30s by economic depression. Into the 1950s there were still elderly people of both sexes – teachers of a kind, librarians, commercial translators, would-be writers – living permanently in Left Bank hotels where they did not even have to make their own beds, much less housekeep. They ate all their meals in the remaining obscure prix fixe restaurants, where napkins were kept for them in rings with their names on. Traditionally, these individuals would claim to be too poor ever to have set up a home, unaware that, as the world changed around them, their antique way of life would be seen by most people as leisured and trouble-free to the point of luxury.)
Other exp
enses mentioned in Latin Quarter budgets of Arthur Jacob’s time were fifteen francs a month to cover clothes and laundry, five for paper, postage and tobacco, and five for membership of one of the many reading rooms which provided a comfortable place with a fire for a young man to read or write away from his minimal lodgings. This would have been welcome to Arthur, for the winter of 1814–15 was cold enough to freeze the goldfish at the Jardin des Plantes in their pool. I am sure, too, that Arthur, judging from the wide-ranging library he later amassed, would have spent some money on books. There were the book and print dealers round the old church of St Séverin by the Rue de la Huchette, and the antiquarian who had set up his huge store in the Gothic cavernousness of the Hôtel de Cluny. The bookstalls along the river, that were to become such a feature of the Left Bank, were already beginning to appear opposite Notre Dame. There were also a number of well-known bookshops in the Rue Hautefeuille, round the corner from the medical schools, and others in the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine itself that specialised in medical works. It was in one of these that Arthur seems to have formed a relationship that was to have long reverberations for his family.
Two years before Arthur’s coming to Paris, a skinny boy of not yet fifteen arrived from northern France to begin work as an assistant in a bookshop in the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine. He came from a family of skilled cloth-workers in Beauvais, who had been impoverished by the general dislocation of society that had followed the Revolution and by the trade blockade of the Wars. His name was Jean-Baptiste Baillière, and he was to prove extremely intelligent and able. He went on to open his own shop in the Rue Hautefeuille – at the spot where, a thousand years before, a Jewish cemetery had been. He became an expert bibliophile and then a publisher of medical and scientific works in his own right. He commissioned finely detailed and coloured engravings to illustrate the physical minutiae of the human body that was then being explored and revealed. He got celebrated surgeons to contribute to compendia that became standard works for the rest of the century. He developed contacts round the world: his work was carried on by Baillière brothers, sons, nephews and grandsons, and branches were opened in London, New York, Madrid and distant Melbourne.
By the time the young doctor and the teenage shop assistant were both old men, an intricate and fruitful link had developed between the Baillière firm and the Jacob family. But by the twentieth century the family story had been recast, assigning the entrepreneurial role in this business arrangement to a dynamic figure (one Tindall) who married into the Jacob family a generation later – a role which, on a closer look at dates and lives, appears implausible. The lost fact that the book-loving Arthur and the founder of Baillière et Cie were both ambitious young men on the same Paris street in the same year seems far more significant.
Given his interests, Arthur could not have failed to visit Jean-Baptiste Baillière’s place of work and make purchases. Getting into conversation with the assistant, he no doubt noticed, as a number of other people had already, how bright the boy was and what a prodigious memory he had for books and authors and scientific details. There is evidence of ongoing contact between the two. Thirty years later Arthur brought out, under the imprint of his own recently formed Dublin Medical Press, a small bound volume of his previous papers and lectures: Dr Jacob’s Essays – Anatomical, Zoological, Surgical and Miscellaneous. This was also published in London, by Hippolyte Baillière, Jean-Baptiste’s younger brother, and in Paris by Jean-Baptiste himself.
From our vantage point in time we see past lives laid out in linear retrospect, everything equally present because it is all done. It is tempting to believe that the later, intricate tie between the two families was already in some sense there while the earliest contact was being made. As the young men stood chatting in the bookshop in the Rue des Ecoles, did the long future reach out momentarily to touch them?
Early in 2008, just as this book was nearing completion and almost two hundred years after Jean-Baptiste Baillière first arrived in Paris, a plaque commemorating him and his great enterprise was unveiled in the Rue Hautefeuille. It seems appropriate that Arthur Jacob’s great-great granddaughter was among the crowd who gathered to honour him.
From Paris Arthur brought home, as well as books, something he was to carry on his person for the rest of his life. This was a tiny hour glass – actually, a half-minute glass – used to take a patient’s pulse in that era when ordinary pocket-watches had no second hand. ‘Pulse watches’ that could count the seconds had existed for some time, but these were rare objects, expensively ornamented, favoured for display by fashionable London doctors but hardly by serious young ones starting out on their careers. Thirty-odd years later, it was a Dublin doctor, a near-contemporary of Arthur’s, who established the importance of pulse-taking for a range of diagnoses, so one must suppose that Arthur put his glass to good use.
Fitted snugly into an ivory case of French workmanship, the whole thing takes up no more room in a pocket than a fat piece of chalk. When every other personal possession, excepting books, has gone, the pulse glass has survived through time and chance, a heartbeat lying quiet in its case.
I want to believe that Arthur, however focused on work, had fun in Paris too.
The great places for popular relaxation at the time were the gravelled, elm-lined boulevards encircling the Right Bank, where cafés had opened and chairs could be rented. Here, John Griscom watched
‘ballad singers, dancers, both children and dogs; conjurors, puppet shows; merry Andrews and fortune tellers; men with castles inhabited by white mice … fortresses guarded by a regiment of Canary birds, which perform their evolutions with great precision; caricaturists or grimaciers, who change their faces into a rapid succession of odd and singularly grotesque forms … thankful for the voluntary sous that may be thrown at them … Fruit women, flower girls, musicians, hydrostatic experiments …’
John Scott, at the same scene, noted particularly the pervasive smell of roasting chestnuts, and of the fruit and nosegays thrust forward for sale. He watched jugglers, a dog turning a barrel organ, and a man with a painted castle on his back from which glasses of lemonade were tapped. He had seen the same man on the Left Bank quays, for on Sundays the caravanserai moved to the quays and the bridges to perform for a public that worked too long hours during the other six days to stroll on the boulevards. There would have been a cacophony of sounds from competing hucksters, adding to the cries of those who hawked their wares in the streets every day – the sellers of charcoal, fish, pans, glass, milk and hot rolls, the lavender girl with her plaintive song, the water-carrier with his stentorian cry ‘A l’eau, à l’eau’. There were the bird-trappers and sellers too, the oiseliers. George Sand, who was from a slightly disreputable aristocratic family on her father’s side, liked to say that her mother’s father had been a Maître-Oiselier – ‘My mother was a child of the streets of old Paris.’
All this was gayer and more engaging for Arthur than the hawkers and beggars of either Dublin or Edinburgh, whose abject urban poverty was the end result of rural poverty under despotic and often absent landlords. But I continue to think, for reasons that appear in his later life, that his favourite walking place was probably the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes.
Chapter VIII
ARTHUR IN ESSENCE
Arthur, we know, went on to become a well-known figure in Irish nineteenth-century medicine: his name is to be found in specialised histories, or on a gilded board in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. But such people too, like all the rest, usually pass from the common stock of memory and reference. The Medical Press and Circular, which he founded, is no more. The teaching hospital he set up has long since been absorbed by other institutions. The part of the eye he discovered when he was not yet thirty is no longer known as the membrane Jacobi, nor is a particular kind of rodent face ulcer any more called ‘Jacob’s ulcer’. Cataracts are not now removed with ‘Jacob’s needle’. The big old house in Ely Place in Dublin, just off Merrion Square, where two ge
nerations of Jacob doctors practised their skills, now contains the smart modern offices of a PR firm.
I wanted to see if I could summon Arthur himself back from the great oblivion. I have handled the books with which he furnished his life and read some of the articles and letters he wrote. I have traced his epic journey: I have marked his footprints in Paris and seen the kind of life he led there and the people he knew. I have held his pulse glass in my hand to time my own heart’s beat. But what was Arthur like as a person?
The limitation of obituaries is that they are usually written about old men, not about men as they were in their vigorous prime. The author of the memorial pamphlet published in Dublin in 1874 seems to have been overawed by the task, regarding himself as ‘treading upon sacred ground’.
‘Arthur Jacob is dead!’ he begins, and goes on to describe ‘an earnest, honest and pre-eminently intellectual man … punctual and energetic, attracting large classes of students, whose boast in subsequent years was that they had been his pupils’. He lists Arthur’s numerous appointments, publications and professional interests, then continues:
‘For many years of his life it was his unvarying habit, after the completion of a laborious day’s work, and having dined, to retire to bed for a couple of hours rest, when he slept profoundly; he then got up, had tea, and devoted the greater part of the night to reading, writing, and preparing notes for his anatomical lectures … which were to him labours of love … To those who had but a superficial knowledge of Dr Jacob, his manner may have appeared brusque, but to those who were intimately acquainted with him the generous, disinterested, honest and thoroughly independent nature of his character was well known …
Footprints in Paris Page 9