by Paul Collins
You will please recite the next passage of Livy.
“Nuper divitiae avaritiam, et abundantes voluptates desiderium . . .”
The scratching of pencils would follow: Of late years, indeed, opulence has introduced a greediness for gain . . .
THERE WERE also less elevated educational pursuits around campus. True, Harvard’s annals were filled with earnest discussion groups like the Pythologian Society, which a young Emerson had belonged to—a debate club composed of “the fifteen smartest Fellows” of the sophomore and junior classes. But for the bottom of the class, there was the Navy Club, which with much pomp and travesty appointed as Lord High Admiral the student with the most suspensions; a Vice-Admiral, for the poorest grades; a Rear-Admiral, for the laziest student; and a Ship’s Chaplain, for the most profane. Though the club’s members were suitably attired in naval uniforms, their expeditions generally sank without a trace in the vicinity of the Porter Tavern.
Others, more serious in their maritime efforts, had noticed the regattas held on the Charles River by local mechanics and decided it was a splendid use for the College Wharf. In just a few years, rowing had become a passion for many at the college, with each class purchasing its own boat and forming its own club. That fall saw four boats streaking down the Charles and under the River Street Bridge, eight rowers and a coxswain apiece, and all decked in duck pants, white shirts with blue stars, and straw boaters. In time, some would find a less formal uniform to their liking.
“Upon these floats,” one scandalized citizen who lived by the river wrote indignantly, “these would-be gentlemen deliberately expose themselves, entirely naked, and apparently glorying in their indecency and ill breeding.”
Most of these campus clubs dissolved within a generation, sometimes under the glare of an unamused college president; others, like a Society to Discourage the Perpetration of Crimes, died instantly from a lack of interest. But one society had notably waxed, even as others waned: the Hasty Pudding Club. Having taken to staging ludicrous theatricals, it was coming off a fine production of battling gentleman nitwits, Slasher and Crasher. The latest production had starred Josiah Quincy—son of the mayor of Boston, grandson of a Harvard president—as the idiotic Mr. Slasher, and there was something salubrious in his being able to take to the stage as a raving, murderous toff.
“Let me get at him—let me annihilate him—reduce him to powder!” Quincy roared to his classmates’ delight. “I insist on reducing him to powder!”
Where the Pudding wasn’t able to provide comic relief, Professor John White Webster and his chemistry students could be relied upon to cook up laughing gas and then, as “an annual frolic,” to sit on the common and inhale it. They dubbed themselves the Davy Society, after the pioneering chemist and noted nitrous oxide advocate. The more ardent student chemists of the lot took over a room in the basement of Massachusetts Hall, and Webster helped them cram the space with cast-off labware. The club’s bylaws against making illicit fireworks were gleefully flouted; interrupting the Davy Club in this vital activity would bring jeers and yells of “Saw his leg off!” Yet Harvard’s backroom chemists could also be public-spirited. After two college servants were overcome by carbon monoxide from burning coals, Webster’s little group frantically cooked up bladders filled with pure oxygen to revive them, stoking the club’s furnace so wildly that it briefly set Massachusetts Hall on fire. Webster later went to his duties across the river at the Medical College building with the cold comfort of having been able to save only one of the men.
The sole consolation for the other was, alas, perhaps the same as for any poor Bostonian who brained himself in a runaway carriage, laughed herself to apoplexy, or sank into a fever beyond the reach of Warburg’s Tincture. Not for them, the terrors of Greek and Latin tests in Room 16. For in dying, they discovered the other way to get into Harvard: through its dissecting room.
2
ON PINS AND CROWBARS
WITH THE AUTUMN CAME THE KNOWLEDGE THAT SOON THE routes into Cambridge would be snowed out for days at a time, isolating the sleepy wooden cottages from the grimy brick of the thriving port city. But with the West Boston Bridge still easily passable, medical students and professors were streaming to and from the city, marking the first week of November the way they did every year: by converging on the opening lecture of the university’s Massachusetts Medical College, now housed in a grand new building by the metropolitan end of the bridge. As if to remind the Harvard men that they were entering the dissolutions of the city, nearby was a fresh wreck: a drunk had galloped his carriage through the bridge toll to avoid paying the nine-cent fee and promptly collided with a horse omnibus, dislocating his shoulder. Sheer drunken luck saved the man’s neck; a little less grace in being thrown onto the pavement, and it would have been just a short drag over to the college’s cadaver storage.
Today, though, the haste was all in their newest professor, Henry Bigelow, who bounded up the building’s front stairs two and three steps at a time. It had been only eight years since he’d been a Harvard medical student himself. But this spacious three-story brick building was hardly the old, cramped space where he’d taken his qualifying exams; the new building had been erected in 1846 on land donated by one of the medical school’s wealthiest alumni, Dr. George Parkman. The steps led to the tall and expansive anatomy and chemistry lecture halls of the upper stories, as well as a library and professors’ offices; one could easily miss the comparatively squat ground floor altogether, where more humble sets of side doors led into a chemistry lab, the janitor’s quarters, a carriage shed, and a dissecting room that stretched out over the backwash of the Charles River.
In the building’s grand anatomy lecture hall, the stage was crowded with skeletons dangling from frames; they gazed out upon rows of wooden seats raked sharply upward, like an amphitheater, sunshine streaming down upon them from skylights above. The rows were rapidly filling with Boston’s physicians, surgeons, interns, lanky young students, and stout old alumni alike. One could trace the city’s history in the names of the new class: Paul Revere had both a grandson and a great-grandson in the crowd, and the old Boston families of Choate, Eastman, Hitchcock, Osgood, and Shaw were all duly represented.
Prominent among the esteemed guests sitting at the front was Henry’s father—Professor Jacob Bigelow, the most senior of the school’s faculty. But then, the entire medical faculty always attended the introductory lecture, as did Harvard’s president; the lecture was, next to graduation day, the medical school’s most important occasion of the year.
“Gentlemen of the Medical Class,” Henry’s voice rang out.
A polite hush fell over the crowd.
“We are assembled in obedience to a healthy custom,” their new professor continued. “It is well that those who are interested in this institution, should meet together once in the year, to testify to their good will to it. We recognize here the guardians of the University, some who look back as if it were yesterday when, like yourselves, they stood at the threshold of their profession.”
For many on the faculty, it had not been so very long since they’d crossed that threshold. Three of the school’s seven professors were recent hires—not least their dean, the poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. But of this new generation, Bigelow was both the youngest and a curious link to the past. His father, Jacob, was in his thirty-fourth year of teaching pharmaceuticals at the school, so Henry knew its traditions as only a faculty brat could. He’d been raised by one med school professor, trained by the three other elders still on the faculty, and even learned his undergrad chemistry from Professor Webster, who split his time between the medical and undergraduate lectures.
The memory of those days with Webster smarted a bit for Bigelow as he lectured. His lungs had suffered from youthful overindulging in nitrous oxide back in his Davy clubhouse days, though it was not exactly known how the damage occurred. And that, oddly, summed up medical science’s dilemma in 1849: physicians knew that laughing gas work
ed as a sedative, and they knew that overindulging in it could harm the lungs; but they did not understand the mechanism for either of these phenomena.
“We still linger upon the lower steps of scientific progress,” Bigelow mused to his new colleagues. “We stand without the edifice, and only gaze bewildered at the complicated manifestations of its exterior. We have only learned that certain occurrences are probable, but we do not know why they are probable.”
In just the past three years, this reckless former student had been one of America’s great experimenters and chroniclers for the discovery of surgical ether, authoring what some thought the most important paper the New England Journal of Medicine had ever published. It was Bigelow’s friend Holmes, though, who had coined a new word for the substance—anesthesia—a choice that won out over “Letheon.” For the students gathered in the lecture hall, a whole new field of medicine had opened up. Some had witnessed anesthesia’s first successful use next door at Massachusetts General Hospital; indeed, this year’s ranks of students also included a number of MDs, eager to pursue postgraduate studies at what was now the center of the most exciting experimentation in the country.
“Pain, but recently an object of insuperable terror, once prohibited many operations,” Bigelow reminded them. “In these days, the surgeon has a lighter task.”
There was one area, though, where their task had grown rather heavier of late: courtroom testimony. With the rise of medical jurisprudence and the first successful prosecution using the Marsh test for arsenic in 1840, doctors had come to have a credible and vital presence in murder trials. Professor Webster, in particular, was in demand as expert on poisoning; just the year before, he’d been called up to New Hampshire to testify in the Roxanna Cook case, a sensational trial over a mysterious death in 1834. The victim’s husband was curiously indifferent to her sudden death, refused both a doctor and a coroner, and afterward promptly married their young housekeeper. The Marsh test having been invented since then, Roxanna’s suspicious family had her disinterred. The resulting trial epitomized the dilemma of courtroom medicine: there was means and a motive, and Webster found arsenic in the victim’s body, but the husband walked free anyway. Understanding the painstaking work and carefully weighed statements of a Harvard medical professor, it seemed, was hard for jurors—harder, even, than for the most recalcitrant freshmen.
“Suppose that a severe blow has been received upon the head, and that a man thus assailed has fallen dead. Before whom is the question brought to issue?” Bigelow scoffed. “Not before a jury who have spent a lifetime acquiring an intimate knowledge of the human body—but before twelve average minds, taken at random from the common walks of life, profoundly ignorant of medicine.”
Trust this unlettered public over a Holmes or a Webster, a Bigelow or even a promising student? Why, the very teaching skeletons surrounding the stage seemed to smile at the notion.
BIGELOW’S EXAMPLE of a severe head injury was not quite an accidental one. Back at home, preparing for a Saturday night meeting of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, he had, in fact, been thinking extensively upon the subject, not least because he was currently hosting a gentleman who’d had his brains blown out.
It was not in his usual run of cases, to be sure. Like most of the faculty, Dr. Bigelow still maintained a private practice in his home; and, always mindful of the poor, he even advertised the free excision of their “tumors, out-growths, or diseased enlargements” during his lunch hour. Such general practice work, above all, involved quickly judging probabilities: a sharp pain in the patient’s side might indicate pericarditis, or perhaps a clot in the lung. But what if a sharp internal stabbing pain proved to be from—well, sharp internal stabbing? There had just been such a case here in town, with a doctor gently extracting a protuberance emerging from between a young man’s ribs. It proved to be a needle that, prior to many internal wanderings, the unfortunate fellow had accidentally swallowed four years earlier.
But—that was just a pin. Bigelow’s own newest case was altogether more unusual.
“A good sized crowbar,” he explained incredulously to his colleagues, “was shot through a man’s brain, and he recovered.”
So the young doctor was beginning his academic career with a most unlikely guest: Phineas Gage, the foreman on a construction gang for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad. The previous autumn, near Cavendish, Vermont, an errant detonation had sent a thirteen-pound crowbar through the bottom of Gage’s head and clean out the top of his skull; the iron bar sailed high in the air and came clattering down eighty feet away. That Gage should survive or even remain conscious seemed impossible; carried to an inn, he proceeded to vomit blood and “about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor.” Yet Gage kept his wits about him, if not quite all his brains, and greeted the local physician drolly: “Doctor, here is business enough for you.” After hurriedly dressing Gage’s entry and exit wounds—through which the brain visibly pulsated with each beat of the foreman’s heart—the doctor found himself with a patient not only stubbornly alive but insisting that he’d be back at work “in a day or two.”
Phineas Gage was somewhat off in his guess. He faced two months of fevers and fungal infections, during which he’d wander deliriously out into the street, his head still clotted with gore. But, improbably, he rallied, and even tried reapplying for his old job. Gage clung to the crowbar—its surface oily to the touch from his brains—as his “inseparable companion.” The sunken left side of his face and his protruding and blinded left eye hinted at their relation to his head wound—as did a strange, indefinable sense among his old friends that he was somehow “no longer Gage.”
Dr. Bigelow had taken an immediate interest in the case after it appeared in newspapers under the headline “WONDERFUL ACCIDENT”—and, wary of a humbug, he wrote directly to the inhabitants of Cavendish for their accounts. Their responses were unequivocal, with reports from laborer to doctor to reverend, even down to the local justice of the peace, corroborating what one respondent called “the greasy feel and look of the iron, and the fragments of brain which I SAW upon the rock where it fell.”
Phineas Gage, in short, was just the sort of man for Harvard.
It was this peculiar, indefinably altered man that Dr. Bigelow had brought to Boston at great expense that fall. The brilliant young Susan Bigelow, who after two years of marriage could already be considered long-suffering, had to bear him as the latest addition to her husband’s strange menagerie. Henry kept a talking mynah bird in his consulting room and a kennel of hunting dogs out back; in his off-hours he liked to carve his own duck decoys, and his mechanical enthusiasms spilled out onto the house’s shelves and filled its closets. Things with holes shot in them were, so to speak, a specialty of his already; as a student, Bigelow had nearly been kicked out of Harvard for keeping a small armory in his Hollis dorm room. It was said that the posts in his old room were still riddled with bullets from his impromptu bouts of target practice.
The hunter’s love of the company of animals, curiously enough, was where Bigelow and Gage found a strange kinship. Since his shocking accident, Gage—once a sober, reliable sort—had turned rather childish and profane around his fellow man. He was only really happy in the unjudging company of animals.
Lie down over there, Gage was told. And keep very still.
The doctor had quills placed in the unfortunate foreman’s nose—so that he might continue breathing—and then cold plaster was slathered over the patient’s wondrously disfigured head. When it hardened, it would be a delicately detailed and calmly countenanced life mask—a fine addition for the anatomical museum.
Nor was this Bigelow’s only re-creation of Gage’s head. The doctor had taken, as he put it, “a common skull” from the medical school’s generous supply and drilled through it to re-create the path of the crowbar. The iron bar, passed through the cranial cavity, would make for a dramatic bit of showmanship before his colleagues during Saturday night’s meeting. After
that, he could bring Phineas to his students in the anatomy lecture hall. These would be Bigelow’s next great presentations that autumn—and surely the most sensational event of the season at the school.
AS THE meeting of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement started that Saturday night, Bigelow first had one other vital discovery to present to his assembled brethren. With all due gravity, he commenced the meeting—Gentlemen, Gentlemen!—by holding up an immense . . . geological find.
“Remarkable Stalagmite,” their secretary carefully recorded in the society’s minutes for November 10, 1849. “Remarkable for its singular resemblance to a petrified penis.”
A roar of laughter was a fair start for any society meeting; they were all old friends. Henry’s father had helped found the group two decades earlier, when they commenced meeting in a rented room over the Smith & Clark pharmacy. The three dozen current members were all local physicians, and almost every one a Harvard man. Before knowing each other in the society, many had spent their student days as part of a secret society, the “Med. Fac.”—a travesty of the actual faculty, initiated through a hazing in a room draped with black, before “professors” dressed in ludicrous colonial-era wigs and knee buckles.
Many old Med Fac boys really were faculty now, right on up to the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Society gatherings fell somewhere between a Med Fac reunion and an actual department meeting; the entire Medical College faculty belonged to the society, save for Webster, the chemistry professor, and even he could be prevailed upon to contribute the occasional item to the society’s journal. For tonight’s meeting, though, the attention was all upon the newest professor and the extraordinary patient he’d brought with him.