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Americans to Paris, it had outgrown its original confines at the corner of the boulevard du Château and rue du Château in Neuilly. The new Memorial Building, designed by American architect Charles Knight, opened next door on boulevard Victor Hugo in May 1926. Looking like a comfortable seaside hotel, the Memorial Building housed 150 patient beds in a central block with two matching wings. The hospital’s charter, signed into American law in January 1913 by President William Howard Taft, required it to offer medical services free to American citizens in France. Wealthy Americans and foreigners, like the kings of Yugoslavia and Spain, paid for private rooms. Indigent Americans were placed in wards. Among Americans without funds was Ernest Hemingway, who came to the hospital at least twice during the 1920s. Dr Bove removed his appendix, after which he began writing The Sun Also Rises in a ward bed. Dr Jackson stitched and bandaged Hemingway’s head when a skylight in his bathroom fell on it. James Joyce was made an ‘honorary American’ to receive eye surgery at the hospital in 1923. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, came to the hospital in 1926 with gynaecological ailments, and Dr de Martel operated on her. Gertrude Stein, the poet e e cummings and other American writers relied on Dr Jackson and the American Hospital for medical care that, as often as not, was given free of charge.

In January 1928, Charlotte Jackson gave birth to a boy. They named him Phillip. In this family of nicknames, young Phillip became Pete. When the Depression that came to France a few years after it hit the United States forced many Americans out of Paris, the hospital lost patients and cut staff salaries. The board of governors sought donations in the United States, and the Paris branch of Morgan and Company Bank extended an overdraft at reduced interest. ‘The permanent American colony in Paris in those days divided quite sharply between those who worked for a living like the newspapermen and those who kept country chateaux and moved between Paris and various spas,’ wrote Eric Sevareid, then a reporter at the Paris Herald by day and for the United Press at night. During the Spanish Civil War, he remembered, it became an ‘impossible task’ for Americans wounded in the service of the legitimate Spanish government to ‘break into that fortress of snobbery, the American Hospital in Paris’. The official American community in Paris, Sevareid noticed, looked down on those who fought against the Nazis in Spain. They were ‘dirty Reds’ to some on his own newspaper and to ‘Dean [Frederick Warren] Beekman, the sententious head of the most fashionable American church’.

Sumner Jackson belonged to the established American colony of Paris. He lived in the most chic district of the Right Bank, and his family spent weekends in the country. His patients were from European aristocracy and American high society. Dean Beekman, the anti-communist Episcopal firebrand of the faux-Gothic American Cathedral in the avenue George-V, was a friend. Yet Dr Jackson was a dissenter. He and Toquette were both agnostics from Protestant, free-thinking families. They had known war and poverty, and both distrusted Hitler. His entry in Americans in France: A Directory, 1939–1940 listed the American Legion as his only membership. Most of the other Americans in the Paris version of the Blue Book belonged to fraternities, country clubs and alumni associations like the Harvard and Yale clubs. As a member of the hospital’s medical committee, Jackson braced the institution for war and took a special interest in his poorer patients.

Soon after the Munich agreement in 1938, the American Hospital’s governors offered their facilities to the French government to treat the wounded if war broke out. When war came in September 1939, casualties were far fewer than in the Great War. The hospital took them in, and Jackson operated on wounds similar to those he had seen between 1916 and 1918. Over Christmas 1939, Josephine Baker sang and danced at the American Hospital for injured French troops. The soldiers,