Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [89]
Under Bliss’s care, however, the president’s diet changed dramatically and, for the victim of a gunshot wound, inexplicably. He received a wide variety of rich foods, from bacon and lamb chops to steak and potatoes. Boynton, Garfield’s cousin and one of the doctors whom Bliss had demoted to nursing status, openly criticized the way the president was being fed. “He was nauseated … with heavy food,” Boynton told the New York Herald. “He was given a dose of brandy that capped the climax, and he threw up everything, and a severe fit of vomiting followed.”
Although Garfield was dangerously ill, the idea of taking him to a hospital was never considered. Hospitals were only for people who had nowhere else to go. “No sick or injured person who could possibly be nursed at home or in a medical man’s private residence,” one doctor wrote, “would choose … to enter the squalid and crowded wards of the public institutions.” They were dimly lit, poorly ventilated, and vastly overpopulated. The stench was unbearable, and ubiquitous. “Patients, no matter how critical their need,” one reporter noted, “dread the very name of hospital.”
Unfortunately for Garfield, the White House was not much better. The structure had been built into sloping ground, and water constantly trickled in, keeping three layers of floors, two of which were made of unmortared brick, perpetually damp. The servants’ living quarters were dark, cold, and dank. The kitchen, which was underneath the central hallway, was almost beyond repair, with whitewash peeling from the ceilings and sifting down into the cooking pots.
Over the years, the moist rooms and rotting woodwork had proved irresistible to the rats that roamed the city and woods. By the time Garfield and his family had moved in, the entire house was, in the words of one reporter, “packed with vermin from cellar to garret.” At night, when the office seekers had finally abandoned their hopes for the day and the staff had retired to their rooms, the family could hear rats scampering under the floorboards and rustling in the pantries.
Worse than the whitewash in the soup or even the rats in the flour bins, however, was the house’s antiquated plumbing system. An inspection found that it did not even meet the most basic “sanitary requirements of a safe dwelling.” Much of the plumbing, one inspector noted, was “defective—not a little of it radically so.” The plumbing system had been built nearly half a century earlier and could not hope to hold up under the daily demands of waste from seven bathrooms in the primary living quarters, as well as the servants’ chambers, the kitchen, and the pantries. Many of the pipes had long since disintegrated, leaving the soil under the basement saturated with “foul matters.”
The decrepit condition of the White House was no secret to the outside world. One New York newspaper referred to it derisively as a “pest house” and argued that it should be torn down altogether. “The old White House is unfit for longer use as a Presidential residence,” the Washington Post declared. “Indeed, it has not, for many years, been suitable for such occupancy.”
Even if the mansion itself had been in good repair, its location was among the worst in Washington. The south lawn ended at the edge of the Potomac’s infamous tidal marsh. Although no one then understood that malaria was carried by mosquitoes, they had made the link between the “bad air” for which the disease was named and the marsh. When the “notoriously unhealthy” house had been blamed for Lucretia’s illness, former president Hayes had rushed to its defense, insisting that it was a perfectly safe place to live. Even Hayes, however, had moved to the Soldiers’ Home in the higher, cooler northwest section of the city every summer, from early July until after the first frost in October, as had Presidents Lincoln and Buchanan before him.
There was now deep concern that the president was being “greatly influenced by the miasma generated by the marshes.” Four servants in the White House had already