Destiny of the Republic (27 page)

Although Bliss admitted that he could not be certain where the bullet lay, he had made it clear from the moment he took charge of the case that he believed it was in or near Garfield’s liver. In this belief, he was joined by nearly every other doctor who had examined the president. While Garfield was still at the train station, one doctor had claimed that he could feel his liver as he probed the wound with his little finger. Hamilton had told a reporter that he “had a suspicion, founded upon a good deal of evidence, that the ball was in the right iliac region, not far above the right groin.” So convincing were the doctors that, soon after the shooting, the
New York Times
had announced that the “bullet has pierced the liver, and it is a fatal wound.”

At least one doctor in Washington, however, believed strongly that the bullet wasn’t anywhere near the president’s liver—that it was, in fact, on the opposite side of his body. Frank Baker, a young man who had recently completed his medical degree and taken a position as an “assistant demonstrator of anatomy” at Columbian University (now George Washington University), had been carefully following Garfield’s case since the day of the shooting. After considering the president’s symptoms and applying some of the basic theories he had learned in medical school, he concluded that, although the bullet had 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 continued to worsen, Bliss began to panic. Finally, at noon on July 26, he sat down and wrote a letter to the inventor, avoiding, as had Bell, the telegraph station. “Will you do us the favor to call at the Executive Mansion at about 5 p.m. today and work the experiment with the Induction Balance on the person of the President?” he wrote in an elegant, slanting hand on White House stationery. “We would be glad to have the experiment tried at the time of the dressing changing, about six p.m.”

That morning, Bell had slept until eleven. He felt “tired, ill, dispirited and headachy,” and had crawled into bed the night before “thoroughly exhausted from several days of hard labour.” He was still hunched over his breakfast when Tainter arrived, carrying Bliss’s letter, which had been sent to the laboratory by White House courier. As he held the letter in his hands, Bell regarded it with a mingled sense of excitement and fear. “Our last opportunity for improving the apparatus had come!” he would write Mabel later that night. Throwing on some clothes, he rushed to the laboratory with Tainter at his side and immediately set to work. He had one objective in mind: improving the induction balance’s hearing range, so that it could detect an even deeper-seated bullet.

The day before, Professor Henry Rowland, who occupied the chair of physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had visited Bell to make a suggestion. If Bell added a condenser, which can store and quickly release an electric charge, to the induction balance’s primary circuit, he could increase the current’s rate of change, and probably obtain a clearer sound. Bell didn’t have a condenser and didn’t have time to find one. That morning, however, in a moment of inspiration, he suddenly remembered that, when returning from his last trip to England, he had brought with him a large induction coil. Inside the coil was a condenser.

Breaking open the instrument, Bell removed the condenser, attached it to his invention, and was thrilled with what he found. Not only did it improve the sound, it increased the induction balance’s range. Bell could now detect a bullet nearly three inches deep in the president’s back. That, he hoped, would be enough.

As he left the laboratory, Bell made a rare stop at the telegraph station. Deciding to try his hand at subterfuge, he wrote to Mabel that the “trial of the apparatus on [the] President” would not take place for several days. The telegram, he later told her, was “intended not for you at all—but for the employees of the Telegraph Company.”

A few hours later, Bell and Tainter arrived at the White House. Between them, they carried the newly improved induction balance, with all of its many parts and a tangle of wires. Approaching the house, they headed not for the front door, where they would risk being seen by the crowds of people still camped out in the park across the street, but to a private entrance in the back.

Bell was uncomfortably aware that the president had expressed reservations about this test. “Mr. Garfield himself is reported to have said that he was much obliged, but did not care to offer himself to be experimented on,” Mabel had written to her mother a week earlier. “Of course not, but Alec isn’t going to experiment upon him.” The test, however, was an experiment. Bell’s invention was less than a month old and had undergone significant changes only that afternoon. He had tested it, moreover, on only one other person, a man who had been perfectly well for many years.

After being quickly ushered inside, Bell and Tainter were shown up the narrow servants’ staircase to the president’s room. When Bell walked in the door, he was astonished by what he saw. The president lay sleeping, a peaceful expression on his face. He looked “so calm and grand,” Bell later wrote Mabel, “he reminded me of a Greek hero chiselled in marble.” Garfield, however, bore little resemblance to the man Bell had seen so many times before in pictures and paintings, always with the appearance of vibrant health—“the look of a man who was accustomed to work in the open air.” The man before him now was an “ashen gray colour,” Bell wrote, “which makes one feel for a moment that you are not looking upon a living man. It made my heart bleed to look at him and think of all he must have suffered to bring him to this.”

While the president slept, Bell worked quickly in an adjoining room to set up the induction balance. Having sent Tainter to the basement with the interrupter, which was too loud to have nearby as they performed the test, he now arranged the battery, condenser, and balancing coils on a simple wooden table. After everything had been connected, Bell lifted the telephone receiver to his ear. To his horror, what he heard was not the cool silence of a balanced induction, but a strange sputtering sound he had never heard before.

Frantically, Bell tried everything he could think of to get rid of the sound. He sent Tainter back to the basement to check on the interrupter, and he carefully adjusted each of the four coils. No matter what he did, the sputtering remained. Pulling a lead bullet out of his pocket, he quickly ran a test and found, to his tremendous relief, that the invention appeared to work. The sound, however, was distracting, and Bell was concerned that the induction balance’s hearing distance might be affected as well.

Before Tainter could even return from the basement, Bell turned to find Garfield’s doctors standing in the door that separated the two rooms, beckoning him to come in. Gripping the handle of the induction balance’s round, wooden detector in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other, Bell stepped back into the president’s room, wires snaking behind him. Bliss had ordered the screen that surrounded the president’s bed to be removed. Garfield was now awake, his wound had been dressed, and he was looking directly at Bell.

Taking in the long wires that stretched out the door and down the hallway, and were about to be draped over his body, Garfield asked Bell to explain to him how the instrument worked. After listening intently, the president allowed himself to be rolled over onto his left side so that the test could begin. He rested his head on an attendant’s shoulder, supporting the weight of his body by clasping his arms around the man’s neck. “His head was so buried on the gentleman’s shoulder,” Bell would later recall, “that he could not see any person in the room.”

Garfield’s bed was surrounded by doctors, eager to see as much of the procedure as possible. The focus of their attention, however, was not just the president and Bell, but Bliss. After carefully pulling Garfield’s dressing gown to one side so that his back was exposed down to his thighs, the doctor turned expectantly to Bell, who handed him the induction balance’s exploring arm. Although it made more sense for Bell to search for the bullet himself while he listened through the telephone receiver, as he had done many times before, Bliss had made it understood that he would be the one to handle the exploring arm, and to decide which areas would be explored.