For his part, Hosack found that his new association with Bard brought its own blessings, even beyond the gift of being mentored by an experienced and affectionate elder. He now gained access to Bard’s many wealthy and powerful patients, and he strove to honor the great trust placed him. Hosack always labored under the cracking whip of his own conscience, which he once described as “an internal monitor” that hounded him if he ever ignored any chance to improve himself as a physician. The pangs that resulted from his own disappointment in himself were “more painful” than any “bodily sufferings” he could ever face. This inner voice had goaded him in Edinburgh and London, and now it drove him to excel at his new duties in Bard’s practice. When Bard returned from his trips to Hyde Park, he heard glowing reports about Hosack from his patients.
Only two years after disembarking from the Mohawk, Hosack had established himself as one of the city’s most respected physicians. A witty, gregarious man with an ample supply of stories about Sir Joseph Banks and other British luminaries, Hosack was also increasingly sought after as a guest at New York social gatherings. His new status was confirmed in the winter of 1797, when he received an invitation to a very exclusive dinner party. On February 28 Aaron Burr had written his thirteen-year-old daughter, Theo, from Philadelphia, where he was serving in the Senate, asking her to show hospitality to a distinguished visitor named Joseph Brant, who would be traveling to New York after having his portrait painted by Charles Willson Peale. Her mother, Theodosia (for whom Theo was named), had died in 1794, and Theo was now the mistress of the household. Burr asked Theo to find some gifts for the man’s daughters; he thought some earrings might do nicely. Theo threw a dinner party in the visitor’s honor and invited several of the most distinguished New Yorkers she could think of. Hosack was among the guests that night. Joseph Brant, Chief of the Six Nations and of the Mohawk people, turned out to have “simple, easy, polished, and even court-like manners”—which made sense, because he had already been received at the court of King George III, more than once.
When they weren’t staying in the city, the Burrs lived in a rented mansion just north of New York called Richmond Hill, built in the 1760s and nestled in acres of gardens, meadows, and woods overlooking the Hudson. The mansion had served as George Washington’s headquarters for part of 1776, and, after the war, Vice President John Adams and his wife, Abigail, had taken up residence there, hosting many dignitaries before the government moved to Philadelphia—among them Jefferson, newly returned from France and resplendent in “red waistcoat and breeches, the fashion of Versailles,” as another guest later remembered. Abigail Adams had loved Richmond Hill, as “delicious” a spot as any she had ever seen. To the north she saw the island’s endless green fields, to the south the spires of New York, and across the Hudson “the fertile country of the Jerseys, covered with a golden harvest.” Burr leased Richmond Hill in the early 1790s, and surviving records of his purchases from a local plantsman suggest that he indulged his love of horticulture. He bought hyacinths, daisies, polyanthus, and also dozens of wood planks, perhaps to build hotbeds for his gardens, or the icehouse he would advertise some years later when he was trying to sublet the estate.
While Congress was in session, Burr was forced to leave his gardens and his wife and daughter to go to Philadelphia, but Theo wrote him frequently during these absences, relaying household news and messages from her mother, who was ill. “Ma begs you will omit the thoughts of leaving Congress,” Theo wrote on one occasion. Unlike many of his peers, Burr believed in thoroughly educating the new nation’s daughters, and he seized every chance to instruct and challenge Theo. Medicine and botany both figured significantly in these efforts, and even as Burr queried Theo about her mother’s health, he pushed her to learn some medical botany. He corrected her spelling of laudanum, and he instructed her to “be able, upon my arrival, to tell me the difference between an infusion and decoction; and the history, the virtues, and the botanical or medical name of the bark.” He also promised to send Theo “a most beautiful assortment of flower-seeds and flowering shrubs.” A decade later, when Burr was considering making an offer on a spectacular estate in northern Manhattan, Theo would urge him to do so because of his love of ornamental gardens. “How many delightful walks can be made on one hundred and thirty acres!” she wrote her father. “How much of your taste displayed! In ten or twenty years hence, one hundred and thirty acres on New-York island will be a principality.”*
In late 1793, Burr, stuck in Philadelphia and worried about his wife, consulted Benjamin Rush for a second opinion about her illness. On Christmas Eve, he wrote her to say that Rush had stopped by his lodgings earlier in the evening and was recommending that she take a tiny dose of hemlock, which “has the narcotic powers of Opium super-added to other qualities.” Rush had told Burr that he had seen hemlock “work wonderful cures.” If Theodosia followed Rush’s prescription, however, it didn’t seem to improve her health. The following month Burr wrote with more advice from Rush, this time directing it to ten-year-old Theo, who was helping care for her mother in New York. “Doctor Rush thinks that [Peruvian] bark would not be amiss.” Over the next months, Burr came to rely on Theo, addressing her affectionately as “my dear little girl.” He wrote her constantly, sometimes even from the Senate chamber.
In the spring of 1794, Burr’s domestic world was shattered. On May 19, he received a week-old letter saying that his wife was feeling much better. Just one hour later, an express delivery informed him that she had died on the eighteenth. Burr would later observe that the loss “dealt me more pain than all sorrows combined.” He now devoted himself to parenting the motherless Theo, who became the center of his emotional life. One winter night in 1795, when Theo was away on a visit, Burr rattled around in the Richmond Hill mansion, missing her terribly. He finally sat down just before midnight and wrote her a tender note. “You are now in the arms of Somnus, or ought to be. . . . Dream on.”
HOSACK, IN ADDITION TO JOINING the Richmond Hill social circle, now began serving as one of Burr’s and Theo’s regular physicians. By the spring of 1796, thanks to Hosack’s association with Bard, he had also begun helping care for Alexander Hamilton’s family. The Hamiltons lived in a house full of children at 26 Broadway, close to the leafy park that spread its shade over the Battery. Alexander Hamilton was just entering his forties; Eliza was about two years younger. Their son Philip, fourteen in January 1796, was the oldest child. According to a surviving portrait, Philip was a beautiful boy with an elfin face, all angular cheekbones and large eyes—a perfect synthesis of the most fetching features of his attractive parents. Next came their daughter Angelica, named for Eliza’s sister Angelica Schuyler Church, and there were three younger boys in the Hamilton family by this time: Alexander, James, and John.
Hamilton’s law practice kept him constantly on the move as he raced to meetings and trials around the city and up and down the East Coast. “When will the time come,” he lamented to Eliza, “that I shall be exempt from the necessity of leaving my dear family?” Political affairs also made persistent assaults on Hamilton’s time, especially after the tumultuous reception of the Jay Treaty. Although he had left public office in 1795, he was as attentive as ever to national politics and was laboring that spring over a momentous document for the president, who had decided not to run for a third term. Washington wished to take his leave with a formal written address to the nation and had enlisted Hamilton’s eloquent pen for the purpose. Throughout the summer of 1796, their drafts flew back and forth between New York and Philadelphia, and on September 19, Washington’s Farewell Address was published in the papers. It was a solemn and beautiful meditation that moved people to tears. “Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your hearts,” Washington told his fellow Americans, he felt assured that they would honor and protect the institutions that guaranteed that liberty. Hamilton was deeply distressed, however, when it became clear that the second president would be John Adams, a man he thought too egotis
tical to govern wisely. Adams returned the sentiment. In a crude insult grounded in humoral theory, Adams would later tell Rush that Hamilton suffered from excess semen, which turned into “choler” and “ascended to the brain”—making Hamilton’s military and economic policies the product of “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find Whores enough to draw off.”
After Washington’s departure, Hamilton continued to advise Federalist comrades on domestic and international affairs from behind the scenes, fretting in April 1797 to his friend Oliver Wolcott Jr., “The situation of our Country My Dear Sir, is singularly Critical.” A joyful family event that summer, the August 4 birth of a healthy baby boy, found Hamilton deeply mired in national politics. Then, in September, Philip fell deathly ill with a mysterious fever. Neither Bard nor Hosack was in attendance. Bard may have been away at his Hyde Park estate, and perhaps in this case Hosack was initially deemed too inexperienced. Whatever the reason, another physician was summoned to the house at 26 Broadway—John Charlton. Charlton was older than Bard and his equal in professional standing. He had begun as a physician in the court of King George III, settling in New York after a tour of duty in the French and Indian War. By the time Charlton was called to Philip’s bedside, he had logged many decades of clinical practice.
Even with his son in such good hands, Hamilton faced a wrenching decision. He had urgent legal business in Connecticut. He felt awful about leaving Philip, yet he tore himself away. Before he had even crossed from New York into Connecticut, he wrote to Eliza. “I am . . . very anxious about my Dear Philip. I pray heaven to restore him and in every event to support you.” Hamilton urged her to make sure the doctor gave Philip cold baths if his fever remained elevated. Charlton had undoubtedly attempted this—it was a common treatment for fevers of all kinds, especially in the earlier stages—and at last he had exhausted every remedy he knew. He thought of Hosack. The latter was relatively untested as a physician, but his youth might be an advantage precisely because he had studied so recently with some of the world’s greatest medical minds. He also possessed excellent instincts and a strong stomach for experimentation. Charlton sent for him.
It was a short walk from 60 Maiden Lane to 26 Broadway. Hosack arrived at the house to find Philip near death. A courier was dispatched to bring Hamilton home immediately, and seeing that Eliza was “overwhelmed with distress,” Hosack sent her out of Philip’s room. Her husband was a war veteran who was accustomed to the sight of dying young men, but Hosack saw no reason for Eliza to watch her son endure a painful end. It was at this terrible moment, Hosack later recalled, that an idea occurred to him. He probably couldn’t save Philip, but he might be able to keep him alive until Hamilton could reach his bedside. Now, just as Hosack had done in the yellow-fever epidemic two years earlier, he decided to place his trust in heat, amplifying its stimulating effects by mixing smelling salts, alcohol, and a strong dose of Peruvian bark directly into the steaming water. Then he lowered Philip in.
As Hosack hovered and waited, Hamilton rushed down the dark country roads toward the city. The previous month had been one of the most distressing of his life. On August 4, the same day Eliza had given birth to their son William in Albany, Hamilton had posted a letter to James Monroe hinting at the possibility of a duel. He was furious with Monroe, whom he suspected of playing a central role in exposing a scandal about to engulf his family. The events now under renewed scrutiny had unfolded six years earlier. In 1791, a beautiful woman named Maria Reynolds had arrived at Hamilton’s house in Philadelphia saying that her husband had abandoned her. Gallantly offering his assistance, Hamilton discovered that “other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable,” as he delicately phrased it, and he had embarked on an affair with Reynolds, soon finding himself the subject of ongoing blackmail by her husband.
By the summer of 1797, both affair and blackmail had long since ceased, but Hamilton’s political opponents felt it expedient to keep the rumors of wrongdoing alive. Now the story had resurfaced in the press, putting him on the defensive again. On August 25, Hamilton had published a detailed statement in which he described his affair with Maria Reynolds and his dealings with her husband, appending so many supporting documents that it reached the length of a short book. Hamilton’s aim was to clear his name of charges that he had compromised his position as secretary of the treasury by passing inside financial information to his lover’s husband. The chief result, however, was public shame for Eliza and scathing ridicule for her husband. When Philip fell desperately ill a few weeks later, his parents were struggling to recover their dignity and privacy in the harsh glare of the national press.
As Hosack had hurried to 26 Broadway to examine Philip, he was acutely aware of what he later described as the “great distress then existing in your family.” He was desperate to spare them a further, unfathomable misery. When Hamilton finally arrived home and learned that Hosack’s ministrations had saved Philip, Hosack felt to his marrow how satisfying and significant his life’s chosen work could be. Back at Columbia, he reworked his lectures on fevers to include the moment he had opened his eyes to find Alexander Hamilton, hero of the American Revolution, kneeling in grateful prayer before him. Hosack could be boastful, but this wasn’t just vanity. It was the most inspiring story he could tell a classroom full of teenage American boys considering a career in medicine.
ONE MONTH AFTER HOSACK’S night at the Hamilton home, his friend Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith dined with Hosack and a mutual friend, Dr. Thomas Parke of Philadelphia. The three men fell into a heated argument about yellow fever. Hosack insisted the fever was not of local origin but imported each year to the United States—he just wasn’t sure how. (Hosack was wrong about the disease being contagious, but he was correct about its importation. It was the Aedes aegypti mosquito, originally native to Africa, that carried yellow fever to the northeastern United States on ships sailing from South America and from Southern ports such as Charleston and Wilmington.) Smith argued that yellow fever was of local origin, and later that night he wrote in his diary that he was “satisfied that it is impossible for Hosack, (as he expects) to prove it to have been imported.”‡ As for treating fever victims, Smith allied himself with Parke—“Parke & I are bleeders”—but Hosack defended his gentler approach of using botanical remedies.
Less than a week later, the medical board of New York recommended that the chief bleeder himself, Benjamin Rush, be hired at Columbia. Rush was longing to move to New York, in part because the controversy in Philadelphia about his treatment of yellow fever had scared off many patients; he knew all too well that his name was now “mentioned with horror in some companies.” But one powerful Columbia trustee was adamantly opposed to the idea of hiring him: Hamilton, with whom Rush had clashed so publicly during the 1793 epidemic. Hamilton managed to block the appointment, and Rush gave up, telling a friend wryly that he felt honored that “the opposition to my appointment has come from that gentleman.”
When Hosack learned that his old mentor was being thwarted by his glamorous new friend, he must have felt personally conflicted, but his principle of political neutrality helped him navigate the situation with both relationships intact. He and Rush continued their frequent exchange of warm letters, with Rush calling himself Hosack’s “friend and brother in the republic of medicine,” while Hosack’s connection with the Hamiltons was only deepening. As Hosack observed Hamilton at home with Eliza and the children, he was struck by the tenderness they inspired in this remorseful husband and father.
Hosack also began to experience firsthand what he called Hamilton’s “highly endowed and cultivated mind.” He had likely read some of Hamilton’s political works before meeting the man himself, but now he learned how brilliant Hamilton was in conversation and what a range of subjects he had at his command, medicine among them. At some point, Hosack confided in Hamilton about his idea for a botanical garden. Hosack had been thinking and talking about it for months, even buttonholing one of his students in the street to a
sk him to procure specimens from an uncle who ran a botanical garden in the West Indies. But it wasn’t until after saving Philip Hamilton’s life that Hosack finally took action. Only weeks later, he approached Columbia’s president and trustees. The current situation, he informed them, had been causing him “great regret.” He could not teach his medical students botany without a garden. He had tried using books and engravings, but they were unhelpfully abstract and they bored the students. “The obvious and only effectual remedy would be the establishment of a Botanical Garden,” Hosack told the trustees.
Three dimensions rather than two. It was being done in the surgical theater, where professors and students sliced into human cadavers, so why not in the equally urgent study of medicinal plants? The president of the college was intrigued, and he convened a committee to consider the idea. They quickly concluded that Hosack should receive three hundred pounds annually for the new enterprise. He was elated at the news. He would have to wait for the funds to materialize, and he hoped it wouldn’t be long.
IN THE MEANTIME, Hosack got his own house in order. He had been a widower for a year and a half, but shortly before Christmas, Elihu Hubbard Smith told a mutual friend, “Hosack has been some time at Phila., where he is marrying. When he returns, there will be feasting &c.” In January 1798, Smith called to take tea with Hosack and his new wife, Mary Eddy Hosack, a dark-haired, slender woman of twenty-eight—the same age as Hosack. They had probably first met during Hosack’s student days in Philadelphia, where they had moved in overlapping, rarefied social circles. Orphaned as a young girl, she had been adopted into the learned, well-connected Wistar family; from time to time, she had sat across a chessboard from Benjamin Franklin. Her foster brother, Caspar Wistar, a prominent physician and friend of Hosack, was later to achieve botanical immortality when the botanist Thomas Nuttall christened a luxurious, purple-clustered vine in his honor: Wisteria. Just a month before the wedding of Hosack and Mary Eddy, her foster sister, Catharine Wistar, had married Franklin’s grandson William Bache. One of Hosack’s botany students in New York later described Mary Eddy Hosack as “the only lady here with whom I can converse on scientific subjects.”
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