Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [108]
This spot, Bell knew, was exactly where Bliss wanted him to find the bullet. Despite that fact—or more likely because of it—he hesitated. There was, he would later write, “a general expectation that the bullet would be found in that part of the body.” His fear was that that expectation might lead him to “imagine a difference that did not exist.”
As far as Bliss was concerned, they had their answer. Like the rest of the city, he had certainly seen the Washington Post article that morning, announcing that, “if success crowns the effort, and the ball is where it is now very strongly suspected to be, the original diagnosis of the wound will be upheld.” It was no secret that that diagnosis had come from the president’s chief physician.
Without wasting any time, Bliss issued a bulletin to announce the successful test of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. It was “now unanimously agreed,” he wrote, “that the location of the ball has been ascertained with reasonable certainty, and that it lies, as heretofore stated, in the front wall of the abdomen, immediately over the groin, about five inches below and to the right of the navel.”
As Bliss declared victory, Bell struggled with a nagging sense of unease. Whatever it was that he had heard as he tested the president, he had never heard it before. It certainly was not the faint but distinct buzzing sound that, after weeks of testing, he would have recognized immediately. Unfortunately, it had been clear to everyone in the room that Bell had heard something, and he had been unable to explain what else it could be. “In the absence of any other apparent cause for the phenomenon I was forced to agree in the conclusion that it was due to the presence of the bullet,” he would later write. “I was by no means satisfied, however, with the results.”
After returning to his laboratory, Bell felt none of the triumph he had felt the night before. As he turned the memory of the test over and over in his mind, trying to understand what had been different this time, he began to wonder if the problem had been some sort of outside interference. The next day, he returned to the White House and asked urgently to speak to Garfield’s surgeons. Were they “perfectly sure,” he asked, “that all metal had been removed from the neighborhood of the bed.” “It was then recollected,” Bell would later write, “that underneath the horse-hair mattress on which the President lay was another mattress composed of steel wires.”
The revelation stunned Bell, who had had no way to anticipate such an unusual and potentially disastrous factor in his work. Box springs would not become common in the United States for another twenty years. As Bell knew, however, it would be difficult to find a better way to interfere with an induction balance than a mattress made of metal. Still, Bell was not convinced that it was the entire source of the problem. It seemed to him that, since Garfield had been lying on the mattress, he would have heard the pulsating sound everywhere he tested, rather than in just a small area near the wound. He asked the White House to send him an exact duplicate of the president’s mattress for testing.
Acutely aware that time was running out, Bell returned to his lab and threw himself into meeting this new challenge. He had just begun, however, when he received an urgent message from Boston. Mabel, who was in the third trimester of her pregnancy, had fallen ill. She had been pleading with him to visit her and their children for more than a month. Now the situation had taken an ominous turn. Determined