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By Root 398 0

and vest, rolled up his sleeves, and ordered that no one touch the wound. Germ theory was one of the principal findings of Dr. Vansant's lifetime, and Vansant operated in sterile whites instead of a black business suit, as he had once done. But no modern supplies were available now. The doctor's mind raced as he was thrown back on his training in nineteenth-century medicine. He had never seen such a wound. What in the Lord's name had caused it? Was it suffused with animal poisons? It appeared like a wound of war, but it was a bite. He recalled the wisdom of his teachers—men who were legendary doctors from the Crimean War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. His mentor, Dr. Samuel David Gross, wrote The Manual of Military Surgery in 1861 at the request of Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. It became the classic Union guide to amputations on the battlefield, using chloroform and a bone saw. Confederate doctors used it too, adding a sip of brandy to soften a man's will for the procedure. But now there was little available but brandy, and nothing could be done, Dr. Vansant realized, until the bleeding was stopped.

Alexander Ott, the heroic swimmer, tore strips of fabric from a woman's dress to use as a tourniquet, but the rush of blood barely slowed. Soon Dr. Herbert Willis, a future mayor of Beach Haven, joined Dr. Vansant at his son's side, along with Dr. Joseph Neff, former director of public health in Philadelphia. The three medical men inspected the wound and conferred. A fish bite of such magnitude was outside their experience. The bleeding was so profuse that the doctors feared Charles wouldn't survive an automobile ride to the nearest hospital in Toms River, thirty miles northwest.

Engle suggested they move the young man back to the hotel, where there was water, soap, and bandages. Dr. Vansant helped carry his son to the hotelier's office. There the men quickly unscrewed the hinges of Engle's office door and laid it across two desks as an operating table, a familiar sight to Dr. Vansant, for it resembled the legendary old wooden operating table in the Jefferson Hospital operating theater. But little else during the crisis was familiar, and it was soon evident that in the hour of his son's direst need, Dr. Vansant wasn't quite sure what to do. This pained him terribly, both as a father and as a physician, dredging up memories he would rather never have re-encountered. For many years, it was suspected by his peers in nineteenth-century medicine that Vansant wasn't properly trained to handle an emergency. The criticism may have been unfair, but it weighed heavily on him since his main critic was the legendary Dr. Gross, the venerable “father of American surgery.”

Gross was immortalized in the most famous medical painting of the nineteenth century, Thomas Eakins's masterpiece The Gross Clinic, in which the renowned professor stands in black street clothes, raising a bloody scalpel to make a lecture point, having made an incision in a young man's leg without sterilization procedures, which were unknown. In the gloom of the operating theater—lit only by skylight—a black-cowled woman, apparently the boy's mother, covers her face in agony.

Vansant heard the grandiose white-haired professor's admonitions in his dreams. Gross had warned that to leave the ranks of legitimate practitioners for a narrow specialty was to forgo the proper education of a medical man, to risk inability to recognize general problems in the major organs and extremities of the body, to be helpless in a crisis. Gross once introduced the most distinguished laryngologist of the nineteenth century, Dr. Jacob da Silva Solis-Cohen, to a lecture hall as a man “who devotes most of his time to a cubic inch of the human anatomy,” adding, “Someday I suppose we will have specialists confining themselves to diseases of the navel.”

The sight of his son also recalled and magnified the feelings of doubt and helplessness Dr. Vansant had suffered upon the sickness and death of his other sons, Eugene Jr. and William. In Engle's office, Dr. Vansant assisted in cleaning