Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,73

be turned away. “He is my patient,” he said, “and I want to see him.” “Your patient,” Bliss replied. “You astonish me.” “Yes, my patient,” Baxter growled. “I have been his family physician for five years, and I wish to see him.” Tossing aside any pretense of professional concern, Bliss said coldly, “You may have been his physician for ten years, for aught I know, but you are not his physician this morning.”

Still stretched out on the sofa, Bliss looked up at Baxter with contempt. “I know your game,” he spat. “You wish to sneak up here and take this case out of my hands. You just try it on.… I know how you are, sneaking around to prescribe for those who have influence and will lobby for you.” Enraged, Baxter shouted, “That is a lie!” At this, Bliss sprang to his feet, and his son, who had witnessed the entire exchange, leapt to his father’s defense, shouting at Baxter to leave. Baxter, painfully aware of “the impropriety of having any disturbance in a room next to that in which the President lay so grievously wounded,” snatched up his hat and strode out of the room, leaving Bliss standing, triumphant, outside Garfield’s door.

Bliss’s coup, he felt, was complete. In comparison to Baxter, the other doctors would be easy to discourage. That day, he sent out copies of his dictated letter to each of them:

Dear Doctor,

At the request of the President, I write to advise you that his symptoms are at present so favorable, as to render unnecessary any further consultations, until some change in his condition shall seem to warrant it.

Thanking you most cordially for your kind attention and skillful advice, and for which the President and family are deeply grateful.

I remain

very respectfully

D. W. Bliss

As expected, the men who had followed Garfield from the train station—even Townsend, the first man to treat the president after he was shot—left quickly and quietly after reading the letter, taking Bliss at his word that the president had chosen to trust his case, and his life, solely to him.

Later, when concern about the quality of the president’s medical care began to grow, journalists would ask how Bliss came to be in charge of the case. “He just took charge of it,” one doctor would say. “He happened to be the first man called after the shooting, and he stuck to it, shoving everybody else aside. Neither the President nor Mrs. Garfield ever asked him to take charge.” Outraged by this accusation, Bliss would insist that, in a private meeting, both Garfield and the first lady had asked him to be the president’s principal doctor and to “select such counsel as you may think best.” To his mortification, however, Lucretia herself publicly contradicted his statement. No such discussion had ever taken place, she said. Neither she nor her husband had chosen Bliss.

Lucretia, in fact, had taken matters into her own hands, securing for James two doctors of her choosing. The first was Dr. Susan Ann Edson, one of the first female doctors in the country and Lucretia’s personal physician. The stout, bespectacled doctor with the ring of tight gray curls had become such a familiar figure at the White House that even the Garfields’ youngest son, Abe, knew her well, referring to her as “Dr. Edson, full of Med’cin.”

Although James had chosen Baxter for his own physician, Lucretia knew that he trusted Edson as much as she did. Just a month earlier, when Lucretia was near death, Edson had been among the handful of doctors he had asked to come to the White House. Not only did he know that her presence would be a comfort to Lucretia, but he had seen her skill and compassion six years earlier, when she had struggled to save his son Neddie’s life.

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