Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

This maneuver earned him the life-long enmity of the three American groups. Park, Gaylord and the rest saw to it that Will was long blackballed from the New York Surgical Society, which meant he could not belong to the American Surgical Society either. Some time later, when Will appeared at the International Surgical Congress in Belgium, Park and the others demanded that he be kicked out, because he was not on the list their official delegation had submitted. The Europeans could not understand this, because he had been Honorary President in Heidelberg, and they said “These Americans are strange!” Over Park’s strenuous objections, the International Committee printed Will’s name, extended every courtesy to him, and invited him to every session and social function.⁶⁶⁹

Like his father before him, Will sought recognition as a scientist. His most systematic study was an evaluation of the “trypsin” enzyme treatment developed by Dr. John Beard of Edinburgh, using one hundred patients suffering from a variety of cancers. Some were advanced cases where no other treatment offered any hope, but it was essential to include early cases that would give any mild curative effects a chance to appear. Will believed it was unethical to deny surgery to anyone who might benefit from it, so the early cases were all patients who resolutely refused to submit to the scalpel. Detailed blood, urine and tissue examinations supplemented careful records of the progress of the disease. In the end, the verdict was clear. Despite the fact it was based on a serious physiological theory about cancer, and was being proposed by a respected physician, trypsin did not work. Scientific realization of this fact saved lives.⁶⁷⁰

Will continued to visit Chautauqua each summer with his mother and sister, practicing medicine from his office in the Athenaeum Hotel. Sixty years later, Sidney Davidson recalled: “He made house calls throughout the grounds in a horse-drawn buggy equipped with a long and efficient whip. A favorite exploit of my brother Treat and Gail Hunter was to unhitch the horse which was tied up while Dr. Bainbridge was making a house call. This required the doctor to chase them and to give them a well deserved thrashing with the whip.”⁶⁷¹

Will labored frantically in his medical practice to support himself, his sister, both his parents, and their servants. The constant travelling he and Lucy did was expensive. But beyond money, his work had the goal of glory. He must redeem his mother’s honor and give her all the luxuries of wealth, in compensation for abandonment by her husband. At times, the pressure would become far too great, and he would be gripped by terrible anxieties, occasionally brought to the brink of nervous collapse. His mother expected him to be her strong staff, and he placed impossible demands upon himself. Only a loving wife could soothe his overwhelming tensions and provide family continuity through another generation, but after the breakup with June Wheeler, there seemed little prospect of marriage.
Hopes and Failures
June did not see Will for more than a year. However, while visiting Boston at the end of 1906, she contrived to meet his father. Attending Sunday services at the Hill Memorial Baptist church, she heard William Folwell Bainbridge preach a sermon, and spoke briefly with him afterwards.

Lucy's husband had been unemployed since leaving the Wilmington church late in 1893. The beginning of 1906 found him living near Cambridge, Massachusetts, laboring on his great work in the library of Harvard University. Hill Memorial was an easy twenty-minute walk from Harvard Yard, across the river Charles. The congregation of working-class families came to respect him, always calling him "Dr. Bainbridge" even though he had never officially earned this title. He proposed to give a series of three stereopticon lectures on “Mission Work around the World,” and the monthly Hill Memorial business meeting voted five hundred flyers be distributed to advertise this event.⁶⁷²

Hill Memorial was deeply in debt, and it needed help badly. Started in 1895 as a prayer meeting in the Riverside Hotel, it had evolved into a church when the Hill family donated land at North Harvard Street and Coolidge Road where the Baptist Sunday School Association moved a chapel. In 1903, its thirty-four members built a substantial but heavily-mortgaged building, grand in a rather massive style, boasting a wide buttressed tower and covered with shingles. A large arched window lighted each side of the transept, and great wooden beams met above the center like a nest of crosses.⁶⁷³

The church had lost its minister, H. Grattan Dockrell, and was in a dispute over his back pay. To receive financial help from the Baptist State Missionary Society, it needed a recognized pastor, but it did not have the money to hire one. Unanimously, the March business meeting selected William, inspired by visions of a thousand dollar loan from the state society at a mere half percent annual interest. Soon they were organizing a choir, inquiring if the Consolidated Gas Light Company would be willing to grant a rebate on past bills, and papering the neighborhood with flyers announcing their services.

By May 1906, William was fully installed as pastor of Hill Memorial, presiding competently over its business meetings, preaching every Sunday, and conducting baptisms. If he was insane, no one seemed to notice at first. He filled the congregation with enthusiasm, sparking a small revival.⁶⁷⁴ Always ready for a fight, William battled former pastor Dockrell and settled the bay pay dispute. He also hinted that persons outside the church had pledged $12,000 to it, under conditions that could not yet be revealed.⁶⁷⁵

William discovered that the church had never actually bought the last fifteen feet of the lot on which it rested, and frantic measuring revealed that it extended nearly five feet onto the neighbor’s property. Furthermore, this heavily mortgaged wooden structure had no fire insurance. William promptly staged an old folks’ concert and a basket party hoping to raise the two hundred dollars needed to fix these mistakes, but collecting only a little more than the insurance money.

The members never fully understood William’s grand financial plans, and in the summer of 1907 they began tabling his motions in the business meetings. He responded by skipping Friday evening prayer meetings, and church attendance dropped. For weeks they debated asking him to hand over $24.60 remaining from the concert so they could pay some current bills, and a committee sent to get it succeeded only after “a rather lengthy and somewhat heated argument.” He wrote them a long receipt demanding his monthly salary, and the trustees unanimously voted to file this document away and “to ignore it in toto as being too mean to need a reply.”⁶⁷⁶

On September 27, 1907, William wrote them, “Yesterday morning I experienced a sudden physical weakness, which indicates unmistakably that I must for a few months now at least release myself from some of the extra burdens I have been carrying. I therefore resign your pastorate to take effect at our Association’s meeting here with us a week from next Wednesday. May the richest blessings of God rest upon you, and lead you out into a large place in His Kingdom of love and service. And may your prayers follow me in the continued greater work of my life to which I have devoted twenty-one years, at as a rule ten hours per day, which must not be over eight hours after this. Evidentially I have been passing beyond the reasonable limits of physical strength at my time in life.”⁶⁷⁷

He offered them a parting gift of twenty-five dollars, by waiving the September salary they were not able to pay him anyway, but they refused it because he wanted them to put it toward the land purchase. Members wrangled over whether to accept his resignation by secret ballot or by a standing vote. Vigorous debate ended when one of the deacons blandly said, “In view of the fact that Dr. Bainbridge has a greater work in view, and as he had not sufficient time to devote to the pastoral needs of our church, his resignation should be accepted in fairness to him and in the best interests of the Hill Memorial Church.” When the secret ballot was tallied, there were eleven votes for accepting William’s resignation, one abstention, and none opposed. The clerk appointed two deacons to bear the news to William, saying that despite the difference of opinion they had experienced with their pastor, “We honestly and thankfully appreciate the great work Dr. Bainbridge has accomplished in clearing the church of all indebtedness, and our prayers and best wishes would be with him in his life’s work.”⁶⁷⁸

Sixty-four years of age, William turned back to the manuscript that had already consumed two decades of his life. For three years he lived at 8 Bayard street, hardly a block from Hill Memorial, before embarking on a long tour of European libraries at his son’s expense.⁶⁷⁹

The weight of the world on his shoulders, Will labored away in Manhattan. When he contemplated the calamity that his father’s obsession had brought to the family, tears welled up and he exclaimed to himself, “What might have been! What might have been!”

On May 18, 1907, June Ellen Wheeler embarked on her second grand tour of Europe, informally attached to a fact-finding junket of the United States Commission on Immigration headed by Republican Senator William Paul Dillingham of Vermont.⁶⁸⁰ Her cousin William R. Wheeler, later to be assistant secretary of commerce and labor, was Theodore Roosevelt’s appointee, and the party was rounded out by Senator Latimer, three congressmen, and sixteen assorted friends and relations. Cousin “Billy” brought his wife Alice, and June shared a cabin with Olive Latimer, “a frivolous, kindhearted, very southern girl of twenty.”⁶⁸¹ The official aim of the trip was to learn the emigration policies of various nations, thus to help the United States decide its immigration policy. The six official members of the commission would split into three pairs. One would investigate the situation in Greece, Asia Minor, and Turkey, while another would do the same in Germany, Belgium, Holland, and France. Wheeler and Dillingham would deal with Austria-Hungary and Russia.⁶⁸² The ladies — called “appendices” by a Washington newspaper⁶⁸³ — would travel around with the others, adding beauty to the voyage.

June rode a gondola through the canals of Venice with Dillingham.⁶⁸⁴ They took walks in Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, and London. In St. Petersburg, they marveled at the beauty of St. Isaac’s church, with its ten columns of malachite and two of lapislazuli⁶⁸⁵ June returned from this exotic realm to Glenheim on September sixth, and the next evening Senator Dillingham telephoned. A romance had blossomed, and Will seemed entirely out of the picture.

The family spotlight turned to Lucy's adopted daughter Helen. President Harper of the University of Chicago recommended her to the domestic science department of Minnesota Normal School in Duluth. Then, Dean George Locke of Macdonald College in Montreal, Canada, who had gone there from the University of Chicago, hired Helen to be an instructor. But when the new School of Household Science was established with sixty-two students, she was given the job of running it instead. She immediately set about to purchase vast amounts of furnishings, supplies and equipment, personally designing the living room of the “practice apartment.”

Two portraits present different images of Helen. Lucy’s favorite photograph shows her serene and dignified in her academic robes, the tassel of her mortarboard carefully draped over the left side and her eyes gazing upward. The photograph Macdonald College preferred shows her with head cocked back and a wide-mouthed smile of exhilaration, wrapped in a silver fox stole with one grotesque fox head perched on her right shoulder and another nestled in her hands. Where Lucy wanted to see an honored scholar, the college would remember a vivacious American “flapper.”

Helen’s tenure at Macdonald was a disaster. Much of the furniture and equipment she bought turned out to be useless and was discreetly consigned to a storeroom for more than half a century before being thrown out. Family legend would claim that illness forced Helen to resign, but in fact she realized her complete inadequacy for the job and returned to Gramercy with bittersweet memories of brief academic glory. The gracious college awarded her a gold medal, inscribed, “In token of faithful service as first dean of the School of Household Science.”⁶⁸⁶ Her brother Will would have to take full responsibility for family glory, and the prospects for a future generation seemed dim.

Lucy's Second World Tour
With no grandchildren to continue the life of her family, Lucy’s mind was very much on “the deprivations of advancing age and the changes wrought by time.”⁶⁸⁷ For two years, she had been contemplating retirement. The treasurer of the Woman's Branch, Gertrude Dodd, wrote, “I cannot bear to think what it will be when you are not our leader! You are right and you ought to give up and not wait until the press and strain wear your out — no one but God and you know what the strain of this great work is — you have a duty to yourself and to Dr. Bainbridge and Miss Nellie. You are right too that ‘it is God’s work and He will send some one to fill the place,’ but you have filled it so wonderfully, you have lived so close to the blessed Master and have been so filled with His spirit.”⁶⁸⁸

The appointment of Edith White as Assistant Superintendent lightened Lucy’s labors and prepared the way for her departure.⁶⁸⁹ Lucy wrote her resignation and groomed White to replace her, but the Executive Committee prevailed upon her to stay in her position a little longer. She arranged a second Asian tour, to visit some of the same mission stations she had seen twenty-five years earlier, with the thought of resuming work afterward.

Lucy left New York in the company of a friend from Cleveland, Mrs. L. G. Smith, stopping in San Francisco, then taking ship for Hawaii. In Honolulu, the two ladies enjoyed the flowers and fruit trees of a luxurious home that had been transformed into a hotel, but the spirit of pilgrimage drove Lucy to explore. “As thoroughly as I could, in a short time, I went over the islands searching for relics of the early missionaries. Old dwellings and chapels of the first Christian period still stood, and I saw its influence in the character and habits of the natives." On Washington's birthday, “Grotesque monsters, shaped in flowers, paraded the streets, each with a ceremonial significance.”⁶⁹⁰

Wearing a lei of fresh blossoms, they departed Honolulu on the steamship Korea, and by March 14 had reached Yokohama, “in good health and spirits.”⁶⁹¹ The treasurer of the Presbyterian Board of Missions provided an American home in a garden overlooking Tokyo. On her first trip to Japan, nearly three decades earlier, Lucy had stayed with a missionary friend, Miss Kidder, whose chief helper and student was a Japanese girl, Sowotome San. Now Lucy immediately sought Sowotome San. “Faithfully she had taught and worked in the mission school, until she had been taken very ill. But with all her pain and weakness, and a distressing cough, she said to me, ‘I am so thankful, so very happy that the religion of Jesus Christ came to Japan and to me.’”⁶⁹²

After a quarter century, the land of the rising sun had changed considerably, although the presence of Christianity was still distressingly weak. On the twenty-third, Lucy wrote, “There is no feeling of depression at all about the changes; it is all progress and life, and the joy of seeing all this again is beyond words. Yesterday we attended church at a native place and I head a Japanese preacher. It was chilly and there were two hibachi — earthen boxes with a little charcoal burning in the center of the ashes. The people were good listeners and never stared at us. All sat around on the matted floor, and the singing of ‘Alas! and did my Savior bleed’ seemed to be sung with the heart as well as the voice. It made me say to myself: ‘They shall come from the East and from the West.’ Oh, the blessed oneness of those who love Christ. Next we attended the English service at the Dashisba and met many of the missionaries.”⁶⁹³

In honor of her previous visit to Japan, the Director of the Imperial Household Agency invited her to attend the Cherry Blossom Appreciating Party held at the Hama detached palace on the afternoon of April 27, “By Order of Emperor, Empress.”⁶⁹⁴ After a call on the American ambassador, she and Mrs. Smith went north to Nikko where a famous shrine deifies the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, giant trees arch the streets, and a grand waterfall roars dramatically among the mountains. “Never use the word beautiful,” a proverb says, “until you have seen Nikko.”⁶⁹⁵ They went west to Kyoto, with its thousand temples, and Nara, with its ancient one. For several days they lingered by the inland sea, then Lucy reunioned with a lady she had recruited to missionary work long before, who had taken charge of a school in Yamaguchi prefecture. In contrast to the primitive jinrikisha that had taken her across Japan on her first voyage, modern railways carried her swiftly.

At the time of Lucy’s first world tour, Korea had been closed to Americans, but now a simple steamboat ride allowed them to attend the first graduation ceremony of the first missionary college. “Here in P’yang we took part in a prayer-meeting, unique because with the new customs the natives retained some of the old. They entered all robed in white and took places on opposite sides of a curtain that divided the room, men to the right, women to the left, while the speaker stood on a platform between where he could be heard on both sides. The only seating accommodation was on the floor, the only illumination dim oil lamps, yet the meeting room was full. In any public gathering, the young Korean women always sat apart from the men, hats well down over their faces to indicate the modesty which was the mark of a lady of position.”

Guests of Dr. and Mrs. Avison, they inspected missionary work in Seoul, including the Severance Hospital, established by the doctor four years earlier with donations from a Cleveland philanthropist.⁶⁹⁶ There were ample opportunities for shopping. Lucy shipped home to Gramercy a splendid wooden chest for silverware, the size of a bureau, containing many drawers of various sizes, closed behind doors and studded with brass butterfly escutcheons.

The relative success of Christianity in Korea, compared with other Asian nations, has been attributed to a strategy devised by Lucy’s cousin, John Nevius, and brought by him to Seoul in 1890. The Nevius Method, like Joseph Neesima’s approach in Japan, stressed evangelism by native Christians, but it went much further in excluding almost all foreign help. Native Christians and their churches should be self-supporting, should recruit new members through active participation in the community, and should limit construction of church buildings to structures of native architecture they could afford without American contributions.⁶⁹⁷

From Pusan, a Japanese boat returned the elderly ladies to Kobe. Smallpox was raging there, so Lucy was revaccinated, although the result showed that she still possessed immunity from an earlier vaccination. They sailed to Hong Kong, passed Canton where they saw the new university, and swept up to Shanghai and thence to Peking, stopping en route where a friend of Lucy’s had been a victim of the Boxer Rebellion, in which many missionaries were slaughtered.⁶⁹⁸ Lucy’s physician cousin, Louis Seaman, had encountered murderous Hung-hutzes during the Rebellion.⁶⁹⁹ The book Louis published about his travels through Manchuria three and four years earlier, which Will admired greatly, provided a lurid tourist guide for the next leg of Lucy’s journey.⁷⁰⁰ Its photographs of severed heads and tales of bandit savagery certainly gave the two unescorted ladies little confidence in their own safety, but the description of the ancient tombs of the Manchu emperors drew them to Mukden in the heart of Manchuria.⁷⁰¹

“In attempting to reach Russia by way of Peking we fell into real adventure,” Lucy later recalled. “The beginning of the Trans-Siberian Railroad was at Vladivostok, but reached only from Korea. This meant a journey back over the way we had just come, and we were not inclined to take it. Further inquiry disclosed that three short roads ran between Peking and the terminal, but being variously Chinese, Japanese and Russian railway lines, the schedules did not function. We nevertheless decided on this route, with the result that we were landed in many strange places with no immediate or connected way of getting out of them. Two unattended ladies might reasonably feel a little nervous at being left to seek a night’s lodging in a land the language of which they did not speak.

“At an inn in one town we met an American missionary on his way home. He was a very thin and worn man, and we noticed that he went directly to his room instead of coming into the dining room. We were served with more mutton chops than we could eat, and I sent word to the missionary asking him to join us. He replied that he was not hungry and meant to retire. But my experienced eye knew the type; I was sure it was a case of voluntary starvation. Afterwards the truth came out — that he was traveling as cheaply as possible so that he would have more to take home to his boys for their education. Convinced that I was right, I went to his room myself and knocking at the door said that his company would be a safeguard to two unescorted ladies and begging him to dine with us. This effort was more successful, and he really helped to dispose of the mutton chops and the next day aided us in making the final transfer to the train that was to cross Siberia.

For Mrs. Smith, their odyssey from China to Manchuria and then across Russia was arduous in the extreme: “We had an unusual trip from Peking to Mukden in covered Chinese oxcarts and trains to enable us to take the train de luxe for a ten days’ run to St. Petersburg over the trans-Siberian railroad, the road between Peking and Mukden being then in process of construction. As we were the first American women to make the journey alone, I smile as I recall it. We traveled in separate carts with wheels in mud up to the hubs, during a drizzling rain all the way. We went at a snail’s pace for miles, but we were good sports and these episodes make a journey interesting as one looks back at it. When we boarded the train that was to take us the rest of the way to Mukden, it was filled with Chinese soldiers. We were thankful to reach our destination alive, although we were treated with the utmost courtesy. We never felt sure of what might be awaiting us around the corner. Oh, the joy! when the train drew in and we were settled in our comfortable apartments with baths; all backaches forgotten.”⁷⁰²
Courtship Resumed
Meanwhile in New York, Will visited Glenheim for tea the day before June Wheeler’s twenty-ninth birthday. A few days later he sent her orchids, gave her supper at the Waldorf, and took her to Charles Ran Kennedy’s play “The Servant in the House.”⁷⁰³ This drama ends in religious allegory as a vicar and a plumber brave typhoid and stench to clean the corpse-filled sewers beneath a church. The evening ended with a ride through the park. Two weeks later, June called on Helen, but Senator Dillingham and and a fellow named Barker captured more of her attention.