Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,92

entered Garfield’s back on the right, it had come to rest on the left.

Baker even drew up a diagram, which traced with remarkable accuracy the course of the bullet. On July 7, just five days after the assassination attempt, he showed it to three doctors, one of whom was Smith Townsend, who had been the first doctor to examine Garfield at the train station. Although he had little doubt that he was right, Baker never shared his theory with Bliss, or with any of the doctors caring for the president at the White House. Acutely aware of his own modest position, he worried that it would be disrespectful to question men of their stature. “I felt,” he would later explain, “that it was improper to urge views which were diametrically opposed to those of gentlemen of acknowledged skill and experience.”

As Baker had guessed, Bliss would not have welcomed his help. Even the physicians Bliss had personally invited to advise him on Garfield’s care were strongly discouraged from disagreeing with him. Bliss’s medical bulletins, which were uniformly optimistic, even when there was clear cause for concern, were a central point of contention. “These bulletins were often the subject of animated and sometimes heated discussion between Dr. Bliss and the other attending surgeons,” one of the doctors would later admit. “The surgeons usually taking one side of the question and Dr. Bliss the other.”

Bliss argued that he was only protecting the president, who had the newspapers read to him every morning. “If the slightest unfavorable symptom was mentioned in one of the bulletins,” one of Garfield’s surgeons recalled Bliss saying, “it was instantly telegraphed all over the country, and appeared in every newspaper the next morning.”

Bliss expected the greatest possible discretion from everyone involved in the president’s care, even Alexander Graham Bell. In Bell’s case, however, he need not have worried. The inventor was well aware that his reputation too was at risk. In that respect, in fact, he had more to lose than Bliss, as he was by far the more famous man. By trying a new and largely untested invention on a dangerously wounded president, Bell was jeopardizing the respect and admiration he had so recently won. If the induction balance did not work, it would be his failure alone.

Reporters had been following Bell closely since the day he had arrived in Washington. “Your arrival and ‘Professor’ Tainter’s was in the papers yesterday,” Mabel had warned him on July 16. “Also a full account of what was said to be the instrument you would use.” The day before, the Washington Post had printed a brief description of the induction balance and promised that “the experiment will be watched with great interest.”

In an attempt to retain some privacy, Bell had avoided sending telegrams. “Ordinary telegrams I presume are private enough,” he explained to Mabel in a long-awaited letter, “but in the case of my telegrams to you concerning the experiments to locate the bullet in the body of the President—I have no doubt they are all discussed by the employees of the Telegraph Company—and thus run a great chance of leaking out to the public Press.”

In truth, reporters had little idea what Bell was up to, as he spent every day holed up in his laboratory, desperately trying to perfect his invention so that it would be ready when Bliss was. Since he had agreed to a brief interview with a few reporters nearly a week earlier, the only people Bell had allowed in the lab besides his assistants were fellow scientists and envoys from the White House. That would change on July 22, when he welcomed his first live test subject.

That day, a veteran of the Civil War named Lieutenant Simpson knocked on the door of the Volta Laboratory. Bliss had recommended Simpson to Bell because he had “carried a bullet in his body for many years.” Bell found a “sonorous spot” on the lieutenant’s back, but he worried that it was too faint to be trusted. He ran the test several times, asking Tainter, his father, and even Simpson himself to try to replicate the results. He also attempted a blindfold test, in which Tainter “closed his eyes and turned away.” Tainter thought that he heard something in the same area Bell had noted, but Bell was skeptical. “I find that very feeble sounds like that heard are easily conjured up by imagination and expectancy,” he wrote to Bliss the following day.

Bell needed more time, but as Garfield’s condition