Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,98

carpets and upholstered furniture be removed, and he ordered the other doctors to take off their shoes so that the sound of their footsteps would not disturb the president’s rest.

As he grew increasingly nervous, Bliss no longer trusted even the doctors he had handpicked to help him. Soon after taking charge of the case, he had given Robert Reyburn, a professor of surgery at Howard University and a close friend of his, the task of taking the president’s temperature several times a day. So many times had Reyburn walked into Garfield’s room holding a thermometer that the president had begun referring to him as “Old Temperature.” Now, Bliss took over even that menial duty, personally taking the president’s vital signs and writing the results in his daily medical bulletins. The other doctors were expected to take Bliss’s word for it that the bulletins were accurate, and sign them without having examined the president themselves.

So tight was Bliss’s grip on the president’s case that it seemed as if he were fighting not for Garfield’s survival, but his own. In a confidential note to a friend, written on White House stationery, Bliss complained that he was “devoting all my professional skills—ability—time & thoughts to this case.” With little sleep and no relief from worry, his own health had begun to suffer, as had his medical practice, which he had completely neglected since the shooting. He had risked everything he had to treat the president, and, he wrote, underlining not just the sentence but each word with a heavy hand, “I can’t afford to have him die.”

What Bliss needed now, as he watched Garfield’s temperature rise and fall like a churning sea, was some good news. On July 30, after instructing Hamilton to insert a drainage tube “farther into the cavity of the [President’s] wound,” Bliss wrote once again to Bell, asking him to return to the White House for a second test of the induction balance on the president.

Bell was eager to try again, but he had not forgotten the humiliation of his first, failed test. “Courage,” Mabel had urged him as soon as she heard the news. “From failure comes success,” she wrote. “Be worthy of your patient.”

When Bliss’s letter arrived, Bell was literally knee-deep in his work. Piles of wire coils littered the laboratory, and battery cells, which consisted of electrodes resting in jars of noxious liquid, sloshed threateningly every time he bumped a table. He was running a new series of experiments, following less scientific theory than empirical method. What he had found was that, not only might it help to double his battery voltage—from four cells to eight—but, more important, he would be better off without the balancing coils. Without the extra coils, he could reduce the resistance, which significantly strengthened the current, and increased the hearing range.

The results, he wrote in his laboratory notebook, barely able to contain his excitement, were “Splendid!” In just four days, he had managed to extend the instrument’s range to more than five inches. The problem was that the only way to balance the induction with just two coils was to overlap them, and they were extraordinarily sensitive to the slightest movement in relation to one another.

By this point the last thing Bell was worried about was aesthetics, but the induction balance had to be portable. Using what he would later describe as “forced exertions,” he and Tainter managed to encase the coils in two rectangular wooden blocks, held together by four pins made of ebonite, a type of hard rubber. The wires now emerged from the sides of the blocks rather than through the top of the handle, but there was no time to make a new handle, so the original one, with an empty hole through the center, would have to do. “In its present form,” Bell admitted to Bliss, the instrument was a “very clumsy affair.”

On July 31, the day before he was scheduled to return to the White House, Bell tested his redesigned invention on a man who lived at the Soldiers’ Home, a veterans’ retirement compound that included the summer cottage where Lincoln had written the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. The test subject this time was Private John McGill, who, for nearly twenty years, had lived with a bullet from the Civil War battle of Gaines’ Mill. Bell had “no difficulty,” he wrote to Bliss that night, “in finding a sonorous spot in his back, where undoubtedly the bullet lies imbedded.” After the test Bell