Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [37]
A year after Jackson’s arrival in France, the United States armed forces joined the Allied cause. Captain Sumner Jackson transferred from the British Army to the American as a lieutenant. One of the few American physicians with modern battlefield surgery experience, he was posted to American Red Cross Hospital Number Two in Paris to treat severely wounded men brought back from the trenches. Jackson met a French Red Cross nurse, Charlotte Sylvie Barrelet de Ricout, and stole a first kiss from her in a linen cupboard. Charlotte had taken up nursing when the war began in 1914. Her lawyer father and her mother were Swiss Protestants, who had settled in France. She loved playing tennis and sailing on a lake near Paris at Enghien-les-Bains, where her family had a holiday house. Jackson called her by her family’s pet name, Toquette, and she called him Jack. Jack had just turned 32 when he married 27-year-old Toquette on 19 November 1917. Nine months after the Armistice of November 1918, the couple sailed to the United States.
When Jackson left the army in September 1919, he and his war bride went from Fort Dix to Spruce Head, Maine, the hometown he had left in 1905 for Bowdoin College, medical school and France. The people of Maine were famously hardy and insular. Most of them voted Republican and minded their own business, and few had been as far from home as Europe. Toquette felt unwelcome. Jackson’s experiences of France and war had alienated him from his New England roots. Before the icy winter set in, the couple moved to Philadelphia for Jackson to take up a medical practice. Somehow, they did not fit. The infamous Palmer Raids that deported aliens for their political opinions exposed a streak of American xenophobia, and the new prohibition on alcohol seemed silly to a couple used to wine with dinner. Jackson wrote to the director of the American Hospital of Paris, Dr Edmund Gros, to inquire about employment. Dr Gros, who had met Jackson during the war, replied that he would be welcome. However, French law required foreign doctors to obtain a French high school diploma, the baccalauréat, and earn a French medical degree. For a 36-year-old physician with his experience it would be difficult to sacrifice four years of his professional life. Dr Gros told him that another American physician who had worked in France during the war, Dr Charles Bove, had taken his baccalauréat and was studying at the École de Médecine in Paris. Jackson agreed to do the same. He and Toquette sailed to France in September 1921.
Jackson studied French with a 30-year-old tutor named Clemence Bock. Despite hard work by teacher and student, Jackson failed the philosophy section of the syllabus and thus did not qualify for medical school. The Jacksons went to Algiers, where he could take the examination again under a regime that was said to be somewhat easier. After nine months of study in Algeria, Jackson passed the exams and was admitted to the École de Médecine in Paris. Two years later, he successfully defended his thesis, moved into an apartment at 11 avenue Foch in the expensive 16th Arrondissement and began work as a surgeon and urologist at the American Hospital.
‘This hospital is a little bit of the United States right here in Paris, Bove,’ Dr Edmund Gros had told Dr Charles Bove a few years before. When Jackson went to work there in 1925, its leading medical practitioners were Dr Gros and Dr Thierry de Martel. The little hospital that admitted its first patient in 1910 had served the French and American armies in wartime, when medical tents covered its expansive gardens. Its American Ambulance Service became United States Military Hospital Number One, treating American casualties from the battles at Château-Thierry and the Argonne. Since the war and the post-war influx of