Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [80]
Edson, who was referred to in the press as “Mrs. Dr. Edson,” had only just returned to her home and practice when her brother and sister, who had been shopping at a market near the Baltimore and Potomac, rushed to her with news of the president’s shooting. Quickly packing a small bag, she had reached the White House just as Garfield was being carried in on the train car mattress. His first words to her had been of concern not for himself but for his wife. “What will this do for Crete?” he had asked her anxiously. “Will it put her in bed again? I had rather die.”
To Edson, however, Lucretia seemed stronger and more determined than she had ever been. The first lady not only welcomed the sight of her own doctor and insisted that she stay, but immediately sent for yet another physician, a man her husband knew well. Dr. Silas Boynton was James’s first cousin and had grown up “tramping through the woods” with him. Lucretia’s telegram to Boynton was brief but firm: “Please to have you come as soon as possible.”
Bliss found to his surprise and frustration that, despite his determined efforts, neither Edson nor Boynton would leave. Annoyed by their persistence, and hampered by their connection to the first lady, Bliss informed them that, if they must stay, they would be permitted to perform only nursing duties, and would not be consulted as physicians in their own right. Ignoring this pointed insult to their education and experience, both doctors agreed to Bliss’s conditions, determined to remain close to the president so that they might watch over him when Lucretia could not.
Very much aware that the world was watching, Bliss was determined not to make any missteps. His temporary ouster from the District of Columbia Medical Society years earlier for consulting with “irregulars”—physicians who were outside the mainstream of medical thought—had led him to shun any association with what he considered to be experimental medicine. In this case above all others, dangerous new ideas were to be avoided at all costs.
High on Bliss’s list of suspect medical theories was Joseph Lister’s antisepsis—a fact that would surprise no one less than Lister himself. “I had a taste of what has been alas! experienced so largely by our profession,” he had lamented years earlier, “how ignorant prejudice with good intentions may obstruct legitimate scientific inquiry.” This prejudice persisted despite the fact that, in the sixteen years since Lister had introduced it, antisepsis had fundamentally changed the way British and European doctors practiced medicine, and had saved countless lives. In his own hospital in London, Lister had not seen a single case of hospital gangrene or pyaemia, a particularly virulent and common form of septicemia, since he had begun using antisepsis. He was certain that, were antisepsis to be adopted in the United States, “all evil consequences might be averted.”
Although five years had passed since Lister presented his case to the Medical Congress at the Centennial Exhibition, many American doctors still dismissed not just his discovery, but even Louis Pasteur’s. They found the notion of “invisible germs” to be ridiculous, and they refused to even consider the idea that they could be the cause of so much disease and death. “In order to successfully practice Mr. Lister’s Antiseptic Method,” one doctor scoffed, “it is necessary that we should believe, or act as if we believed, the atmosphere to be loaded with germs.”
Why go to all the trouble that antisepsis required simply to fight something that they could not see and did not believe existed? Even the editor of the highly respected Medical Record found more to fear than to admire