Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [12]
Dr. Vansant heard it often said in America after 1900, “a man had to run faster just to catch up.” But for an Anglo-Saxon gentleman raised in the frontier days of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, there was hardly time to catch a breath. Just as a man was getting used to a few things—macadam, alarm clocks, elevators, unconscious thoughts, evolution from apes, telephones, pizza, frank talk about sex, big cities, mass magazines, movies, “the problem of the young,” the first concrete baseball “park,” the death of God—the scientists announced that time and space were illusions. The key paper of Einstein's general theory of relativity, smuggled into England in the spring of 1916, created confused fears not only over the collapse of Newton's laws but of the moral foundation of the Judeo-Christian world. In time, Dr. Vansant's son Charles's generation would postulate modernity: There were no absolutes—of time and space, of good and evil, of right and wrong. “Anarchy,” William Butler Yeats wrote in 1916, had been “loosed upon the world.”
Fretful thoughts and forebodings had kept the doctor up in the feather bed in the second-floor master bedroom. Nineteen sixteen was the most unsettling year he had known, as the pace of bad news in the Ledger raced unabated. Recently, the American Medical Association, based in Philadelphia then, had called for “preparedness” camps to train eight hundred American doctors to take army mules into the field (ambulances hadn't yet been invented) in the event of American entry into the European war. The doctor's friends and colleagues at the AMA had been heroes and medical legends in the Civil War and Spanish-American War, but he had been too young to serve. Privately, Eugene's colleagues filled him with stories of the futility of medicine in the face of weapons that butchered men beyond repair. That year, a Victorian gentleman's worst fears about the modern age were realized: Tens of thousands of soldiers died at the Somme in an unleashing of “all the horrors of all the ages,” wrote a young war correspondent, Winston Churchill.
Lying awake as he had many nights since the snow melted, Eugene Vansant ruminated about his own inability to serve his country once again, this time because he was too old. And about his son Charles, who was old enough to be called to the European front should Wilson fight the kaiser. The hot weather made sleeping difficult. Next to him, Louisa slept fitfully. The doctor's wife was fifty-six, elderly for a Victorian woman, wearied from bearing him six children, two of whom died in infancy. She was heavy-set and the heat was hard on her. Moths and mosquitoes blew in on the warm night air from the bay window over the street.
In the morning, Eugene could feel moist tropical airs sweeping into the city, air associated, in the doctor's training, with disease. Vansant had been alarmed by reports in the Ledger the previous week of a rapidly spreading epidemic of “infantile paralysis” in New York City that had killed hundreds of children and young adults. Panicked authorities, who closed schools, theaters, vaudeville houses, stadiums, and hotels, hadn't a clue how the disease traveled—through dirt, physical contact, perhaps the hot, humid air. It would be thirty-nine years before Jonas Salk, then one year old in New York City, would develop the vaccine for the disease, later known as poliomyelitis, or polio. The epidemic was spreading to northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Dr. Vansant had treated a number of cases in