Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,6

greatest boon ever conferred upon suffering humanity by human means.” After listing several other discoveries that were the result of American intelligence and industry, Lister beseeched his audience to cast aside their egos and listen to him. He was there, he said, in the hope that they would finally accept “the truth, the value, and the practical application of the principles of Antiseptic Surgery.”

For three hours, Lister did all he could to persuade his audience. He explained his process, gave examples from his own surgical studies, and met each of the doctors’ criticisms, one by one. To the common complaint that antisepsis was “too much trouble,” he replied simply, “It is worth some trouble to be able to seal up an amputation, an exsection, or a large wound, with the absolute certainty that no evil effects will follow.”

Seated in the audience, listening to Lister, was Dr. Frank Hamilton, a highly regarded surgeon from New York who would one day, quite literally, hold James Garfield’s fate in his hands. When given an opportunity to speak, Hamilton assured Lister that he would be “glad to have you convince us that your method is the best.” In his own practice, however, Hamilton preferred to use methods that were quite different from antisepsis. Among them was the “ ‘open-air treatment,’ in which no dressings whatever are employed, but the wound is left open to the air, the discharges being permitted to drop into proper receptacles, or to dry upon the surface.” Hamilton also highly recommended soaking dressings in warm water, and then applying them directly to open wounds.

A few weeks after Lister tried in vain to persuade men like Hamilton that, without antisepsis, they risked the very real danger of killing their patients, James Garfield was descending, once again, into what he knew as the “darkness of death.” At his home in Washington, he watched helplessly as his youngest child, Neddie, a beautiful little boy who had contracted whooping cough soon after attending the centennial fair, died in his small bed.

After he had lost Trot, so many years earlier, Garfield had thought he could never again feel such an all-consuming sorrow. He realized now how wrong he had been. “I am trying to see through it the deep meaning and lesson of this death,” he wrote. “God help me to use the heavy lesson for the good of those of us who remain.” Despite his belief in the goodness of God, however, Garfield knew that death was cruel, unpredictable, and, too often, unpreventable. Perhaps even harder to accept was that the science he so deeply admired, for all its awe-inspiring potential, seemed powerless in the face of it.

Searching for a way to teach his children this hard truth, to prepare them for what inevitably lay ahead, Garfield had often turned to what he knew best—books. After dinner one evening, he pulled a copy of Shakespeare’s Othello off the shelf and began to read the tragedy aloud. “The children were not pleased with the way the story came out,” he admitted in his diary, but he hoped that they would come to “appreciate stories that [do not] come out well, for they are very much like a good deal of life.”

• CHAPTER 2 •

PROVIDENCE

I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that I may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

James Garfield’s father, Abram, had died on a spring day in 1833, just a few months after his thirty-third birthday. As he had peered out a window that day, surveying the farmland he had just saved from a raging wildfire, he had known that he would not survive the “violent cold” that had so suddenly seized him. The house he would die in was a log cabin he had built four years earlier. It consisted of one room, three small windows, and a rough, wooden plank floor. The windowpanes were made of oiled paper, and the gaps between the logs were filled with clay in a futile attempt to shut out the brutal Ohio winters. The house and the land were all his family had, and he had done everything he could to protect them from the fire.

Like his ancestors, who had sailed from Chester, England, to Massachusetts in 1630, just ten years after the Mayflower, Abram had left all he knew in search of a better life. His father had stayed in the East, on a small farm in