Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [132]
Bell, still a young man, had an astonishingly busy and productive life yet ahead of him. Soon after Garfield’s death, he would become a United States citizen. In 1888, he and a small group of like-minded men would found the National Geographic Society, whose ambition it was to create “a society for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.” About the same time, Bell also founded the Volta Bureau, “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the Deaf.” In 1893, he moved the bureau into a yellow-brick and sandstone building, now a National Historic Landmark, on Thirty-fifth Street in Washington, D.C., directly across the street from where he had earlier moved his Volta Laboratory.
Although he would continue to work on a wide range of inventions, most strikingly with various forms of flight, for Bell, the desire to help and teach the deaf would be the overarching passion of his life. In 1886, Captain Arthur Keller traveled to Washington from Alabama to see Bell. He brought with him his six-year-old daughter, Helen, who had been left blind, deaf, and mute after contracting what may have been scarlet fever when she was nineteen months old. Years later, Helen Keller would remember that meeting with Bell as the “door through which I should pass from darkness into light.” So grateful was she to Bell that sixteen years later, she would dedicate her autobiography to him.
Keller wrote her memoirs when she was just twenty-two years old, but Bell, even near the end of his life, refused to write his own. When repeatedly asked to put down on paper the extraordinary events of his life, his reply was always the same: He was “still more interested in the future than in the past.”
Bell would live to be seventy-five years old, dying at his home in Nova Scotia on August 2, 1922. Alone with him in his room was his wife, Mabel. She had been by his side when he was an unknown, penniless teacher, and she was with him now, forty-five years later, as he left the world one of its most famous men. Moments before his death, Mabel, who would survive her husband by only six months, whispered to Alec, “Don’t leave me.” Unable to speak, he answered her by pressing her fingers with two of his own—sign language, their language, for “no.”
Like Bell, Joseph Lister would live a long life, long enough to see his ideas not only vindicated, but venerated. Over the years, he would be given his country’s most distinguished honors—from being knighted by Queen Victoria in 1882, to being made a baron by William Gladstone a year later, to being named one of the twelve original members of the Order of Merit, established in 1902 by Edward VII, Victoria’s son, to recognize extraordinary achievement. What Lister valued above all else, however, was the knowledge that doctors around the world now practiced antiseptic surgery, and that their patients had a far greater hope of keeping their limbs, and their lives. “I must confess that, highly, and very highly, as I esteem the honors that have been conferred upon me,” he would say later in life, “I regard all worldly distinctions as nothing in comparison with the hope that I may have been the means of reducing in some degree the sum of human misery.”
Long before his death at the age of eighty-four, Lister would be recognized as “the greatest conqueror of disease the world has ever seen.” Nowhere, however, was his contribution to science, and to the welfare of all humankind, appreciated more than in the United States, a country that had once dismissed his theory at tremendous cost. In 1902, more than twenty years after Garfield’s death, the American ambassador to England would give a speech at the Royal Society in honor of