Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,122

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 the fiftieth anniversary of Lister’s doctorate.

“My lord,” the ambassador said, addressing Lister as he sat in an opulent hall, surrounded by powerful men and celebrated scientists, “it is not a profession, it is not a nation, it is humanity itself which, with uncovered head, salutes you.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It does not take much exposure to the vast and rich collection of Garfield’s papers and artifacts to understand that our twentieth president was not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man. The story of his remarkable life and brutal murder is told in heartbreaking detail in hundreds of diary entries, letters, and personal artifacts—a historical treasure trove that would have been lost long ago were it not for the exceptional skill and devotion of the men and women who are the keepers of our nation’s great archives.

While researching this book, every time I visited one of these archives I found largely forgotten items that, more than a century after Garfield’s death, brought him suddenly and vividly to life. At the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., I was shown the lead bullet, smooth and flattened by the impact with Garfield’s body, that Guiteau shot from his .44 caliber gun on the morning of July 2, 1881. At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, I held in my gloved hands the section of Garfield’s spine which that bullet had pierced. At the National Museum of American History, I had the great honor of being able to closely examine the many versions of Alexander Graham Bell’s induction balance—in various shapes and sizes, with