Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

Lucy moved to the apartment across the hall, but a door led from her bathroom to the one Will and June used. The North side of Thirty-Four was connected to another building, so Lucy’s "Black Kitchen" had no windows, while June’s apartment enjoyed sunlight from windows all along the south side. Lucy remained active with the Mission Society, taking seriously her status as Honorary Superintendent. For further activity, she joined a women’s organization called Sorosis, which was the model for the literary club she had joined back in 1876 in Providence..

Way back in 1868, the Press Club of New York scheduled a banquet for English author Charles Dickens at Delmonico’s restaurant, selling tickets to the men of the press at fifteen dollars a head. Among those who wrote for a reservation was journalist J. C. Croly. The club was about to issue a ticket, when it realized with consternation that the applicant was a woman. Jennie Croly shamed the club into admitting her to the dinner, but too late for her to bring the other ladies of the press. Therefore, she organized her own banquet at Delmonico’s and used the episode to form a ladies’ society, “to promote agreeable and useful relations among women of literary and artistic tastes.”⁷³⁷ This was no bland tea party, but a “freemasonry” of “women of thought, culture and humanity” to discuss “new facts and principles, the results of which promise to exert an important influence on the future of women and the welfare of society.” June also joined “the mother of clubs,” and later served as its president.⁷³⁸

The Limits of Medicine
From England, William Folwell Bainbridge wrote his son a prophetic warning: “Don’t be too dead sure in scientific work. Perhaps you do not need such caution, as you are naturally conservative, but all along the line we have reached the period of uncertainty. Dogmatism must go to the scrap heap, in all the sciences as well as in theology. Do not be ashamed of reasonable agnosticism. A world of knowledge is yet to be approached by: ‘I don’t know.’”⁷³⁹ Will took this wisdom to heart, as well he should, because his own science was about to receive the most dreadful possible challenge.

Fourteen months after the wedding, June presented Lucy with her first grandchild, a girl they gave Lucy’s second name, Elizabeth. A newborn’s first meal is always difficult, but very quickly Will saw that Elizabeth was not getting any nourishment. The agonizing truth dawned: she was born without an esophagus.

Lacking a connection between her mouth and her stomach, Elizabeth would die of thirst and dehydration before she died of hunger. She would die quickly, unless something could be done to save her. She was fortunate, it would seem, that her own father was a great surgeon. Perhaps he could operate, make a connection through which nourishment could pass, and cheat cruel fate.

Lucy’s own first child, Cleora, had died from a congenital deformity, “water on the brain,” that the surgery of later generations might have cured. Bearing her grandmother’s name, thus symbolically extending her grandmother’s life, Cleora had died. Now Elizabeth was ready to preserve a portion of Lucy’s identity against the old age that was progressively weakening her.

One reason Will had waited so long to marry, along with the challenge of supporting his parents and sister, along with the power with which Lucy dominated his emotional life, was the fear that his family line was genetically tainted. His sister Cleora had been deformed; his father perhaps insane. Now his daughter, also, was deformed. Water on the brain is congenital, but it is not genetic, arising accidentally rather than being programmed into the genes. But Will would not have known this, because the necessary research had not yet been done to establish the fact.

Now Elizabeth, his helpless deformed child, lay before him. With every breath and every tear she was dehydrating toward death. He had often operated upon children, and considered himself a pioneer of childhood surgery. He was one of the first to attempt spinal analgesia with the very young, preparing them for difficult operations by injecting cocain, stovain or tropacocain in their spines rather than anesthetizing them with the ether gas that was so difficult to regulate. He competed against other surgeons to see who could bring the youngest child safely through surgery with a spinal; by the time Elizabeth was born he had employed the method more than a thousand times with only a single fatality attributable to the analgesia. Although primarily intended for operations to lower potions of the body, Will had been able to work on practically any part of the anatomy, and the difficulty of ensuring Elizabeth could breathe while he cut into her tiny throat and chest recommended the technique. His record for youngest patient was three months.⁷⁴⁰ Success with a newborn infant was possible, if he could devise the right plan of surgical attack. If anyone in the world could save her, it would be Will.

At the age of four days, Elizabeth died.

Years later, Will would call Elizabeth a bud from his June rose, saying she “has been transplanted and is now in the Garden of the King.”⁷⁴¹ Like him, June and Lucy had religious rhetoric ready to wrap around pain, but how well faith actually comforts the bereaved is an open question.

Surgery often lacks the power to do good, and sometimes it has the power to do harm. On one of his early trips to London, Will met Dr. William Arbuthnot Lane, a vastly influential British surgeon who pioneered the use of metal plates to mend broken bones, served as the King’s surgeon for many years, and earned a knighthood.⁷⁴² Lane was controversial; Will said he was the inventor of injecting saline solution into the bloodstream, but nearly lost the right to practice because other physicians considered this so harmful.⁷⁴³

Lane's obsession was the conviction that food should move swiftly through the intestines, lest it sit, rot and poison the entire system with its toxins. Lane had devised a “cocktail” to speed dinner on its way, consisting primarily of liquid paraffin which he took daily and gave to his family, servants, parrot and monkey.⁷⁴⁴ Slow digestion unleashed toxins that could travel to any part of the body and trigger any manner of illnesses, including lumpy breasts, poor circulation, “lassitude, inability to perform ordinary duties, mental distress, migraine headaches, laziness, and poor temper control.”⁷⁴⁵

Chief causes of this chronic intestinal stasis, Lane believed, were kinking of the intestines and adhesions that held the guts in unnatural positions. Surgery could free the intestines to move to their proper positions, and removal of sections of intestine shortened the food's route. Even tuberculosis, Lane felt, could be the result of stasis, and he operated when other doctors saw no role for surgery. One child was in the final stages of tubercular joint disease, until Lane excised all but nine inches of the lower intestine, supposedly causing a great improvement.⁷⁴⁶ Will saw Lane’s work in London on five trips between 1907 and 1913, operated with him, and became very enthusiastic about his theories and methods.⁷⁴⁷

In Will’s view, Lane had one essential failing: no religion. Lane once said to Will’s Belgian friend, Hertoghe, “I cannot think of any consideration of another life by a rational mind.”⁷⁴⁸ The stasis theory was a substitute for religion. Another doctor once described Lane’s inability to change his opinions: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.” For Will, Lane’s irreligiousness was a handicap in his medical practice. Like Lane, he abhorred orthodoxy and revered the pioneers of medicine across the centuries who had repeatedly challenged the opinions of the majority.⁷⁴⁹ If the surgeon could not rely upon orthodoxy to guide him, and progress demanded bold experimentation on human beings, what basis could medical ethics and sound therapeutic practice possibly have? For Will, the answer had been given by Christ: “As ye would that others should so unto you, do ye also unto them.”⁷⁵⁰ Every time he operated, Will would begin with a silent prayer that the “good physician” Jesus would guide his scalpel and bless his judgment.

Will had induced Lane to come to the United States back in 1909, and imported all of Lane’s instruments, sterilized in sealed cans, so the British surgeon would feel at home. They toured America together, lecturing, holding clinics, and operating before audiences of surgeons who then could try the heroic techniques on some of their own constipated patients.

Four years later, just a few months after Elizabeth’s death, Lane was delayed in making a second trip to America, so Will undertook alone much of the lecture tour he had arranged. In Cincinnati, he defended Lane’s sanity when he called the cecum, where the large intestine begins, a cesspool.⁷⁵¹ He told the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy that stasis might be behind some forms of the disease.⁷⁵² People “have to be plumbed right or the nerves cannot work right.”⁷⁵³ In her public speaking, his mentor Dr. Mosher began demonstrating the evils of stasis with a full-scale silk model of the intestinal tract which she called “the human sausage.”

Skeptical doctors denounced the theory of chronic intestinal stasis, accusing Will of having such dextrous hands he could demonstrate bowel kinks that did not exist. In New York City, where many colleagues were already hostile to him, a group of physicians came to Gramercy and threatened to have Will’s medical license yanked if he persisted. Years later, he would have the delicious pleasure of saving one of them from charges of medical malpractice. His response to the accusations was not to quit but to hire a medical artist to make accurate drawings of the intestines of five hundred of his patients during operations and to project photographs of twisted intestines in public lectures.⁷⁵⁴ In St. Louis he showed pictures of stasis operations in exchange for an honorary degree, Master of Surgery.⁷⁵⁵

When Lane finally did arrive in America, Will arranged a splendid dinner in his honor at New York’s St. Regis Hotel, presenting him to swarms of American doctors. Strict teetotaler that Lucy had raised him to be, Will never served wine or other alcoholic beverages, but this time each guest found an elegant bottle at his dinner place, wrapped in straw and decorated with the red, white and blue colors of the American and British flags. As they poured the viscous contents into their wine glasses they discovered that it was the non-alcoholic liquid paraffin cocktail Lane had devised to promote speedy digestion. Will published extensively on stasis in the medical journals.⁷⁵⁶ He never accepted Lane’s contention that it caused all cancer, but he never quite abandoned belief in Lane’s general theory, even as the fad faded from American medicine over the following decades.⁷⁵⁷

Will designed an improved operating table and promptly publicized it through a long historical essay on surgical furniture that amounted to a thinly disguised sales brochure.⁷⁵⁸ Two rival doctors, Frank Hartley and Francis Murray complained that Will’s table was identical to their own. He lashed back that there was nothing distinctive about their table, and he listed a string of features, such as the arm extension and divided foot supporters, that made his vastly superior.

Strange medical conditions always fascinated Will, such as the case of the perfect lithopedion. A fifty-four year old widow came for consultation about a lump in her lower abdomen that had resisted two years of unconventional electrical treatments and various medicines. Will to perform an immediate hysterectomy. In the midst of the surgery he summoned the hospital photographer to document the removal of a three-pound ossified foetus. At the time of the woman’s last pregnancy, twenty-four years before, a second child had been conceived outside the uterus, and had developed for about seven months before becoming fossilized.⁷⁵⁹

Another case contributed to Will’s scientific research on the possibility that hormones liberated by pregnancy made cancers grow more rapidly. About four months into a pregnancy, a thirty year old mother of two children had noticed a tiny black spot just below the meeting of the eyelids of her left eye, on the side near the nose. Three months later, when it had grown to the size of a pencil eraser, she entered the Polyclinic Hospital to have it removed. Will took it out, along with what seemed a safe margin of healthy tissue, but less than two weeks later he removed a small recurrence. Concerned that growth of the cancer might be stimulated by the pregnancy, Will advised the woman to consider an abortion, but she refused on religious grounds. From then, the cancer fairly exploded, and Will performed a series of operations, progressively cutting away the woman's face, before she died twelve days after giving birth to a healthy child.⁷⁶⁰

One of Will's most controversial methods was injection of nearly pure oxygen gas into the abdominal cavity as he closed the incision. The idea came to him back in 1903, when he was operating on a charity case at Randall’s Island, an eight-year-old boy with tuberculous peritonitis. Will began to open cavities in the boy's abdomin to remove fluid, when the patient collapsed. “Seeing an oxygen tank nearby, I suddenly thought that if oxygen is good for inhalation it might have an effect in the body cavity. I quickly introduced some of the oxygen into the two compartments and sewed up the abdomen leaving the two cavities inflated with gas. Remarkable immediate improvement was noted which lasted for some hours but the disease was too far advanced and the child died after several days.”⁷⁶¹

Another startling case was a fifty-three year old woman who weighed 124 pounds before abdominal surgery and only 63 afterward. She fell into great shock after the procedure, so he filled her abdomen with oxygen until it was nearly as big as before. Her body took two weeks to absorb the oxygen, and she lived for many years afterward.⁷⁶²

To perfect his techniques, Will experimented on fifty cats, blowing them up like furry balloons, trying various gas pressures and immersing them in a jar of water to see if oxygen was escaping around the sutures.⁷⁶³ When anti-vivisectionists complained, he suggested that they volunteer for the experiments in place of the cats.⁷⁶⁴ In a demonstration to the King’s County Medical Society in Brooklyn he rawed the intestines of two living cats. The first one, given ordinary surgical treatment, immediately died of shock. Will pumped oxygen into the abdomen of the second, and it promptly ran out of the hall.⁷⁶⁵

Very little of Will’s work was experimental, however, and he was famous for his ability to undertake vast numbers of conventional operations per day without succumbing to fatigue, thus saving thousands of lives. In 1910, a New York school girl named Aleda suffered a ruptured appendix with peritonitis. Death was certain without an operation, and before the introduction of antibiotics, death was likely enough even with skillful treatment. Will removed the appendix, and as Aleda herself recalls, “Due to good care and God’s will, I recovered and have had a very happy and healthy life.” Seventy-six years later, after marriage and a full life, Aleda was still living and shared her Florida home with two fat dogs.⁷⁶⁶

Whatever its dramatic or scientific qualities, Will’s work was also a business, and his public appearances were effective advertising. Patriotic duty and self-promotion combined at the beginning of 1913, when Will joined with other doctors to form the Medical Corps of the United States Navy Reserve, and he was proud to be the first officer commissioned under that banner, becoming lieutenant, junior grade.⁷⁶⁷ His summers doctoring at Chautauqua greatly magnified his fame, and with Drs. Babbit and Seaver he built a fully-equipped twenty-two bed hospital called The Lodge.⁷⁶⁸

Unexpected Peril
In the summer of 1913, Lucy went again to Europe for her health, with her old aide from the Mission Society, Ida Brandt. Christina, the Fraülein whom Brandtie had saved from white slavers years before, welcomed them with great warmth, proudly showing off her comfortable home, her husband Fritz, and their two strong boys. For five pleasant weeks they took the waters at Bad Nauheim just north of Frankfort am Mein in Germany, meeting people and hearing concerts. Unexpectedly, a letter informed her that Will was near death. He had been operating on a case of appendicitis, moving with his customary skill and speed. An assistant accidentally stabbed his left forefinger with a scalpel, piercing the messy surgical glove, driving infection into his flesh, and giving him blood poisoning. After incompentent treatment by a colleague, the infection spread upward through the entire hand, then the arm.⁷⁶⁹

As Lucy read the terrible news, her hands trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. She left the room and went to pray. After a while she returned, greatly comforted, and said to Brandtie, “I have given my dear boy into my Father’s keeping and He has given me the assurance that all will be well with him.”⁷⁷⁰

The tip of the wounded finger was amputated, and gradually the infection subsided. When Lucy learned that her son was out of danger, she told Brandtie, “I trusted my God for his recovery and now I must go and thank Him.”⁷⁷¹ Again she prayed.

For Will, the loss of the finger tip was a crisis of the first order, nearly ending his career as a surgeon. A surgeon not only acts through his hands, he feels through them. Working deep inside the human body, often without clear vision of the structures he is cutting, he relies upon the sense of touch. Will taught his students that the tip of the left index finger was a surgeon's guide inside the human body.⁷⁷² But Will had lost that guide. How could he support Lucy, June and the baby she was carrying, if he could no longer operate? As often happened when his burdens were too great too bear, he was seized by nervous exhaustion.

His standard prescription for such cases was travel. June put Will aboard the Imperator of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, bound for Europe, before she took train for Wisconsin herself to escape the heat of the city. His hand was still in great pain, and his entire arm ached, especially after twice-daily massages that were part of the treatment, along with salt baths and frequent changes of bandages. He enjoyed the liner’s steam baths, pool, and gymnasium. While reading The Inside of the Cup, a novel about city mission work and the debate between Protestant traditionalism and scientific modernity, he would work his stiff left hand to build up its strength, despite the pain.⁷⁷³

Will had cabled his mother he was coming, but the wire was lost, so Lucy was astonished when Will strode into her hotel in Lucerne.⁷⁷⁴ Dr. Eliza Mosher was on hand to supervise things in her usual forceful manner. After a few days of intermittent rain, and vibratory treatment of the hand, they toured the Alp-bordered string of lakes to the southwest. Will was not sleeping well, gripped by bouts of anxiety.⁷⁷⁵

From the Giessback Grand Hotel and Kurshaus on Lake Brienz, he wrote June: “The music is playing and it is after dinner. Mother is in the parlor where the orchestra is holding forth and I am across the hall in the waiting room quite homesick for Junibus. Mother was tired after her trip from the Italian Lakes and I felt it best to rest here several days. Besides it is delightful here and there is a good massage man on call. I find the stiffness comes out of the hand only slowly and strength only comes by bits. Still, I am gaining right along. I told you I would write frankly and so I will. When I think of the problems I do not sleep well and I know thereby that I am not yet ready for the battle again. Precious, all will be well! We have traveled the course for sure.” He closed by sending his love to “Scrapum,” the foetus scraping around in June’s womb.⁷⁷⁶

To counter the anxiety, he began again on the cancer book he had been writing on and off ever since the Heidelberg conference, and work was a good therapy for his nerves. He bought postcards of children, labeled them “Scrapum,” and mailed them back to June.⁷⁷⁷ A week later he and Lucy were in Paris, where his hand received electric treatments from Dr. A. Joseph Rivière, famous for fighting cancer with electricity.⁷⁷⁸ The day before they crossed to London, Lucy bought a baby dress for her expected second grandchild and wrote June about Will’s progress: “His hand is much better, and his nerves are getting stronger, but he knows his need of this change and rest from old lines of work.⁷⁷⁹

When Will returned to New York, June improvised prosthetic finger tips sewed from soft, skin-colored lambskin and filled with cotton. With infinite patience he practiced manipulating small objects with his left hand, until his surgical skill neared its previous level, finding it awkward but possible to transfer many of the functions of the left index finger to the middle finger. He became very sensitive about this disfigurement, because it so profoundly threatened his career.
A Birth and a Death
Thirteen months after the death of her first child, on January 11, 1914, June gave birth to a baby boy they named William Wheeler Bainbridge. Lucy gave her first grandson a linen pillow slip with embroidery and filet lace from Switzerland, a pink and white knitted sweater, and the long embroidered dress she had bought in Paris. Billy fairly blossomed with embroidery, receiving a linen jacket with Puerto Rico embroidery from Mrs. Thomas A. Edison, a short frock elaborately embroidered with roses from Lady Lane, Swiss embroidered dress patterns from Dr. Mosher, and a white jacket embroidered in blue flowers from June’s niece Muriel Wheeler.⁷⁸⁰

After the heartbreak of baby Elizabeth’s death, they were going to take no chances with Billy. Many strangers wanted to hold him in their arms, but Will was afraid they would give him diseases, so he purchesed a large doll they could hold instead. June clipped a magazine poem about the need to sterilize a baby’s bottles, and his milk, but sadly not the cow; nor could they boil his thumb. “The recklessness with which he sucks his vagrant tiny thumb imperils much his precious antiseptic little tum.”⁷⁸¹ A picture snapped in May shows Billy, bright eyes and a puckered smile beneath a full head of hair, parted on the right, sitting in Lucy’s lap on the Glenheim porch. That summer, his feet were covered by a tiny pair of lace shoes from China.

By naming the baby after himself, Will incidentally perpetuated his father's name. When pressed, Will would say his father was an archaeologist who had learned eleven languages to facilitate his important work. “Following the pastorate in Allston he went to London for research in the British Museum, then to Paris, Berlin and Egypt. Later he worked quietly on his manuscript at Alassio on the Italian Riviera and finally returned to finish his work at Cambridge, close to the Harvard library.”⁷⁸²