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By Root 304 0

past years, as the terrible affliction began, and often ended, in the throat, and parents turned to him, a specialist in the emerging field of laryngology, as a savior. A sore throat, headaches, fever, and nausea were followed by paralysis of the limbs—including the muscles of the larynx, causing death by asphyxiation. Dr. Vansant was powerless to stop the course of the disease, and it had broken his stoic reserve more than once to watch a child die. It brought back painful memories from his youth in the nineteenth century, rattling in the City Hospital horse cart to the river tenements, where rag-shrouded creatures shrank from his touch. Doctors were considered agents of death, and the poor went to hospitals to die; the agony ended in the dead house with a coroner performing a candlelit autopsy. Dr. Vansant had no desire to revisit the dark days of medicine, when all a physician could offer was mercy.

As one of the leading laryngologists in the United States Vansant was familiar with the foremost medical thought on infantile paralysis: The best way to protect a child was to remove him from the city to the countryside for the tonics of isolation, rest, and clean air. And the cleanest air in the United States blew pure and free across the Atlantic and over the lovely New Jersey shore, Dr. Vansant and many Americans believed.

Dr. Vansant was looking forward to a long, soothing, and restorative stay. The shore was a place to escape the crowding and disease of civilization. By autumn, when the cool weather blew in, the epidemic would be a distant memory, and perhaps Wilson's neutrality would hold.

If any age could cure the disease of infantile paralysis, Dr. Vansant believed, it was his era of scientific “modern medicine,” the age of miracles. “Scientist” was a new word of the nineteenth century, replacing “natural philosopher,” and Dr. Vansant was exceptionally proud to be a scientist in the days when that distinction was worn like a title at court.

Eugene Vansant was a practitioner of the most powerful science of all in the new century, that of medicine. He practiced in the golden era of American medicine, when doctors enjoyed a new and radiant status. The turn of the century was not just the grand scientific age of ocean liners and telegraph lines, moving pictures and the electric light; it was a time of medical marvels. Pasteur discovered that microorganisms caused disease; the British surgeon Joseph Lister developed antiseptic surgery; vaccines sent into retreat such ancient scourges as typhus, smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, and the black death. By 1900, human populations were booming; men were living longer. Nature itself was under control in the great age of science and optimism. And of all the men who symbolized mankind's control of nature at the turn of the century—industrialists like Vanderbilt, engineers such as Brooklyn Bridge-builder Roebling, inventors like Edison and Ford, Progressive politicians who would improve the very nature of man—physicians were beginning to surpass them all. The ancient dreaded practitioners of leeching and bloodlettings had become, in the new century, the “saviors of humanity.”

In the winter of 1916, Eugene Vansant turned fifty-seven years old, an age when most men at the turn of the century had died of old age or were putting their affairs in order. But Dr. Vansant was fit and wiry-strong, walked briskly without the aid of a cane, and had not a hair that was white. He was a small, fine-boned man easily underestimated by other men, but his firm jaw and large, noble forehead were said to be scientific evidence of fine character and intelligence (a dozen fellow Philadelphia scientists had weighed their colleagues' brains after death to test the principles of phrenology). His walrus mustache was a relic of a different time, but it gave him a certain Rooseveltian force. Those who noticed a likeness to T.R. kept it to themselves, as the doctor was not known for his sense of humor. Wire-rimmed spectacles framed startling, intense blue eyes, a habitually nervous, icy gaze difficult for