Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [82]
In the five years since he had heard Lister speak, Hamilton’s opinions had not changed, and his arrogance, it seemed, had only grown. Soon after reaching the White House, he assured a reporter that the president’s care would “bear the severest scrutiny of the experts,” and that there was little danger of him dying. “The symptoms are so encouraging,” Hamilton said, “that it seems to me the President now has pretty clear sailing. He is fairly in deep water, with no threatening rocks and little danger of running aground.”
In his confidence, Hamilton was exceeded only by Bliss, who was impatient to present himself to the American people as the calm, competent leader of the president’s medical team. Just a few days after the shooting, he settled into Joseph Stanley Brown’s office with a journalist from the New York Times. Languidly lighting a cigar, he told the reporter, “I think that we have very little to fear.” As a crowd began to gather around him, anxious for news of the president, Bliss warmed to his subject. “President Garfield has made a remarkable journey through this case, and it was a happy wound after all,” he assured his audience. “I think it almost certain that we shall pull him through.”
As Bliss spoke, smoke from his cigar rising in thick curls and filling the room with a heavy, pungent smell, the bright sky outside Brown’s window darkened. Without warning, an afternoon thunderstorm swept through the city. Rain fell in torrents, distorting the trees and river beyond, and lightning illuminated the grounds in short, sharp flashes.
The president, Bliss said, was “the most admirable patient I have ever had. He obeys me to the letter in everything, and he never makes any complaints about my orders.” This quality above all others, Bliss believed, would serve Garfield well. As he had stressed to another reporter only a few days earlier, the president could not hope for better medical care. “If I can’t save him,” he said, “no one can.”
As he sat in his father-in-law’s house in Boston, surrounded by chattering children and a wife eager for his attention, Alexander Graham Bell’s mind was still churning. Since he had learned of the assassination attempt, he had been able to think of nothing but the president. “I cannot possibly persuade him to sit, just these days,” Mabel complained in a letter to her mother. “He is hard at work day and night … for the President’s benefit.”
Bell knew he could find the bullet. He just did not yet know how. His first thought was that he might be able to flood Garfield’s body with light. He had read about a patient in Paris whose tumor had been revealed when his doctors inserted an electric light in his stomach, setting him aglow “like a Chinese lantern.” After considering Garfield’s injury, “it occurred to me,” Bell wrote, “that leaden bullets were certainly more opaque than tumors.” Deciding to run a few quick tests, he asked his secretary to hold a bullet and a miniature light in his mouth. As he had hoped, Bell could clearly see the bullet, a dark shadow against the young man’s illuminated cheek.
In a simplistic way, the technique anticipated the medical X-ray. The problem was that, even if Bell used an intensely bright light in a darkened room, the bullet would have to be very near the surface to be discernible. If it was deep in his back, as Garfield’s likely was, hidden behind dense layers of tissue and organs, it would never be seen.
As Bell worried about the flaws in his initial idea, the answer suddenly came to him. What he needed was not a light, but a metal detector. The memory of an earlier invention, he would later write, “returned vividly