Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

At the beginning of 1913, William Folwell Bainbridge had written his old friends at Hill Memorial, “My literary work of past 28 years is nearing its close, but I need three months more in the East for satisfactory revision.”⁷⁸³ But the work was still not done late in 1914 when he took up residence at 51 Brattle Street, three blocks from Harvard Yard, in a very fine seven-story apartment building that cost his son a heavy rent. Among the forty-six other residents was Dr. Albert August, who immediately began monitoring William’s health.⁷⁸⁴ On January 9, 1915, died of “angina pectoris” with “arteriosclerosis contributory,” as August wrote on the death certificate.⁷⁸⁵

Lucy, Helen and Will rushed to Boston. The two ladies stayed in a hotel while Will conferred with Dr. August, and with the help of the undertaker he did a remarkable thing. Will conducted an autopsy of his father, dissecting his own father’s brain.

To look into his father’s face, to lift the scalpel and cut across the brow, to scrape the saw back and forth across the skull, to pry the top off his father’s head and see the exposed brain, these acts required a nerve and a motivation that no ordinary human possessed. Perhaps he could find a medical excuse for his father’s aberrations. Maybe a benign tumor, an unrecognized injury, or hints of tuberculosis. Even signs of syphilis would be welcome. Evidence of dementia praecox, or schizophrenia, would be impossible to recognize, and mere eccentricity had no physiological marks. Alcoholism might show itself in the shape or texture of the brain, but it would have been readily apparent without an autopsy. No revelation awaited Will inside the skull of his father, and he shipped the corpse to the Swan Point cemetery in Providence where baby Cleora had lain for forty-five years. Turning her mind from death to life, Lucy telegraphed congratulations to little Billy on his first birthday.

Lucy’s husband left a meager legacy. There was the pewter cup, made by Rogers, Smith and Company of New Haven, that marked the beginning of his ministry, inscribed “First Baptist Church, Erie, Pa., July 1865.” And there was the vast, unfinished manuscript. With Lucy’s help, Will began the painful process of trying to get the manuscript published. In words that barely hinted at the agony of the effort, Will wrote: “The manuscript was submitted to authorities on Bible study and general culture. These all expressed unqualified admiration for the phenomenal patience and great learning displayed by the author in its preparation, but they declared that the cost of publication was prohibitive. Publishers estimated that the printed product would be four volumes, each the size of an unabridged dictionary. It was estimated that to print the plates and maps prepared by the author would cost twelve thousand dollars and that the cost of printing the volumes would be forty thousand dollars.” Eventually, to end their painful obligation to publish the manuscript, Lucy and Will destroyed it.

Shortly before his father’s death, Will had published his own magnum opus, The Cancer Problem.⁷⁸⁶ Writing it had been a massive effort, reaching back over ten years, drawing upon seven trips to Europe, covering the material in a fifty-page bibliography. In authoritative prose aimed at general practitioners, nurses, medical students and interested lay people, it presented the great mystery and challenge of this terrible disease: statistical epidemiology, etiology, histopathology, diagnosis, and treatment. Dozens of laudatory reviews appeared, in such periodicals as The Times of London, Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet.⁷⁸⁷ Thus, Will surpassed his father even in the intellectual realm that had become the old man's obsession.

The Prophecy of the Adlon
On April 26, 1915, humorist Irvin S. Cobb overate at a huge banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and acquired a painful stomach ache. It increased, became complicated, and was judged dangerous.⁷⁸⁸ On May 1, Cobb underwent an operation at Will's hands to repair a hernia, that soon became one of the most famous surgical procedures ever done, immortalized by his humorous essay, “Speaking of Operations.”⁷⁸⁹ First published in the Saturday Evening Post, this personal account of being carved sold half a million copies when issued as a small book, and it was translated into nearly a dozen foreign languages.

Calling Will "Dr. Z," Cobb described first meeting him at 34 Gramercy: “He sat at his desk, surrounded by freewill offerings from grateful patients and by glass cases containing other things he had taken away from them when they were not in a condition to object.” No time was wasted attempting to calm the patient’s nerves.

“I presume it was because he stood so high in his profession, and was almost constantly engaged in going into the best society, that Doctor Z did not appear to be the least bit excited over my having picked him out to look into me. In the most perfunctory manner he shook the hand that has shaken the hands of Jess Willard, George M. Cohan and Henry Ford, and bade me be seated in a chair which was drawn up in a strong light, where he might gaze directly at me as we conversed and so get the full values of the composition. But if I was a treat for him to look at he concealed his feelings very effectually. He certainly had his emotions under splendid control. But then, of course, you must remember that he probably had traveled about extensively and was used to sight-seeing.”⁷⁹⁰

Will recommended an operation. At New York Polyclinic Hospital, Cobb did not have any more privacy “than a gold-fish,” thus contributing a cliché to our language. “I am strictly on the doctor’s side. He is with us when we come into the world and with us when we go out of it, oftentimes lending a helping hand on both occasions.” At the time of the banquet, Cobb was preparing to return to France where he had been writing about the war, and the operation forced him to delay several weeks.

Each day’s news kindled Will’s interest in the medical and adventurous aspects of the Great War. His cousin, Louis Livingston Seaman, had justified his own far-east tour during the Russo-Japanese War as an opportunity to see the latest in military medicine.⁷⁹¹ Now war had come to the nations where Will had studied medicine and made friendships, and it afforded a marvelous opportunity to see the advances in surgical technique stimulated by thousands of interestingly mangled bodies. With his commission in the naval reserve, Will had been operating occasionally on special cases for military hospitals around New York, and he felt drawn to the great conflict raging across the ocean.

For a few peaceful days, Will and June visited Senator Dillingham in Vermont, leaving Billy in the care of Lucy and Helen. With their help, he sent his parents his first telegram: “I am well and happy and play every morning with Grandma. Yesterday I tried to pick up a bit of sunshine off the parlor floor. I love the squirrel.”

Fully aware that June was pregnant for the third time, Will launched his own mission to Europe.⁷⁹² Cobb gave him letters of introduction, saying Will was “one of the foremost surgeons of the United States who is abroad to study hospital methods within the military lines.”⁷⁹³ Will collected similar letters from the mayor of New York, the surgeon general of the navy, and the secretary of war. With a hint of Red Cross aegis, operating in a capacity somewhere between official and unofficial, he hoped to examine military hospitals and prisoner-of-war camps on both sides of the western front.

Will departed in the company of Sanford Griffith, a fresh graduate of the University of Chicago, whom Will had known at Chautauqua and who wanted to become a war correspondent.⁷⁹⁴ They sailed for Rotterdam on the Dutch liner, New Amsterdam, which carried its name in immense letters on each side so German submarine commanders would realize it belonged to a neutral nation.⁷⁹⁵ Neutral Holland was inundated with the flotsam and jetsam of war. Savornin Lohman, an elderly editor and statesman Will and Lucy had met back in 1906 when they attended the Heidelberg conference, arranged for Will to tour Dutch refugee, intern and prison camps.⁷⁹⁶

As they prepared to enter Germany, Will wired June then followed up with a trio of melodramatic letters explaining he had to destroy the simple code they used for compressing long messages into short telegrams, lest he be mistaken for a spy.⁷⁹⁷ Will and Sanford entered Germany near Bentheim and went straight to Berlin, where Will unsuccessfully sought permission to visit Antwerp in occupied Belgium, ostensibly to inspect medical facilities but actually to contact his friend Hertoghe. At Buch, a northwest suburb of Berlin, Will saw a splendidly designed military hospital with six thousand beds.⁷⁹⁸ In the German capital itself he toured the central laboratory where vaccines were prepared.

Will stayed in the Adlon Hotel, and he did everything possible to convince the Germans he was sympathetic to their cause, so they would speak openly. He invited to dinner two high-ranlked German officers, one a member of the general staff, and coaxed from them their views of what Germany would do if it did not decisively win the war: “Following the war there will be economic hell, industrial revolution. We will set class against class, individual against individual, until the nations will have pretty much all they can attend to at home and not bother with us... The greatest struggle will come after the war. The weapon will be propaganda, the value of which we know. The Allies will be torn asunder, each will be put at the other’s throats like a lot of howling, gnashing hounds. And when they are all separated from France, Germany will deal with her alone.’”⁷⁹⁹ Ever afterward, Will referred to this remarkable admission as the Prophecy of the Adlon, sharing it with American government officials, referring to it in numerous speeches, and publishing accounts of it in English and French.

At restaurants and theaters, Will and Sanford Griffith observed officers with resplendent uniforms arrogantly elbowing people out of the way. They took photographs, then were suspected of being spies. Fortunately, their films turned out to be blank and they were allowed to continue their journey.⁸⁰⁰ In Köln they inspected a military hospital with two thousand beds, and they examined the prisoner of war camp at Darmstadt.⁸⁰¹ Eight days after entering Germany, they crossed into neutral Switzerland at Berne, having seen “the great machine at the height of its power.”⁸⁰²

A week later in Paris, Will spoke to a luncheon gathering of Americans and secured a pocket full of safe-conduct passes from the Préfecture de Police, Gouvernement Militaire de Paris.⁸⁰³ Most exciting for Will was observing the new Carel-Dakin technique for dealing with infected wounds, at the Compiègne Hospital, northeast of the city. Fifty years earlier in the Civil War, when Lucy daubed the bandages of wounded men with contaminated water, she had no idea that microbes were responsible for the infections that she innocently passed from soldier to soldier. But by the Great War, medical science understood perfectly well what infections were; the problem was how to defeat them. Many disinfectants were being tried, vile concoctions that burned the flesh of the soldier. Henry Dakin’s was one of the best, and Major Alexis Carrel of the French army developed a scientific method for administering it.⁸⁰⁴

The patient was placed on the operating table, and the surgeon carefully cut open the wound to form a single large cavity, removing all foreign bodies and excising dead flesh along the tracks made by the projectiles that had caused the wound. He would try to save large blood vessels, tendons, and nerves, but he might cut out much muscle to get a good, open well for the disinfectant solution, all the while fighting hemorrhage.⁸⁰⁵

After much cleaning, the surgeon inserted rubber tubes into the wound and constructed a system of gauze, cotton wool, wires, sticks, safety pins and even wooden clothes pins to hold the tubes in position. The tubes connected through Y-shaped fasteners to a pinch cock to control the flow, and from that to the container. Dakin’s solution was hypochlorite of soda, colored pink with potassium permanganate, at a concentration of between 0.45 and 0.50 percent. Below that concentration, it cannot kill the bacteria. At a higher concentration, it will harm the patient. At regular intervals, smears are taken from all corners of the wound and examined under the microscope. The treatment continues until no bacteria can be seen, which may be as soon as four days or as long as a month.

Leaving Sanford in Paris, Will crossed the English Channel to Folkestone in the middle of October and a week later departed from Falmouth for the United States on the Rotterdam.⁸⁰⁶ He returned to New York none too soon, because on the first of November June bore a second son. With Lucy’s proud approval, they named him John Seaman Bainbridge, after her beloved father. Lucy wanted to know what the war was like. Will explained, “War has no silver lining, no bright side, but by war some noble elements in men and women are brought out.”⁸⁰⁷
Consolidation of the Family
America was officially still at peace, when Lucy’s daughter Helen married Consuelo Andrew Seoane, commander of a field company stationed in El Paso, Texas. A native of Virginia, "Con" had enlisted as a lowly private in the spring of 1898, swept up in the patriotic fervor that immediately preceded the Spanish-American War. Back when Will was procrastinating over joining up, Con was already with the Third Cavalry fighting in Cuba. A Mauser bullet pierced his right lung, and he carryied the slug inside him for the rest of his life.⁸⁰⁸ Will’s cousin Louis Livingston Seaman was a surgeon and senior officer with the Santiago expedition who believed “incompetency” incapacitated the Army's medical service.⁸⁰⁹ When the Philippine Insurrection broke out the following year, Con was promoted to second lieutenant in the 41st U. S. Volunteer Infantry, and once again he served with Louis.

Con’s greatest adventure began in June, 1909, when he and naval doctor Joseph “Snake” Thompson disguised themselves as South African naturalists interested in reptiles and beetles and set out upon a two-year espionage tour against Japan. Their mission would have brought instant death, if the ubiquitous police ever realized they were American spies. Con was particularly worried that Snake hid a camera in a secret compartment of the creel in which they carried specimens. Beginning in Hong Kong, they traveled through the Ryukyus and Okinawa, the length and breadth of Formosa, spied for seventeen months in the home islands of Japan, then briefly investigated Manchuria and Korea.

They examined dozens of potential invasion points, memorizing as much as they could and using a code to insert a few crucial facts into an apparently harmless naturalist’s diary. For example, when they viewed the Sendai Temple they wrote that there were one hundred and thirty-five steps in the approach, referring actually to the total number of artillery field pieces they had seen in the area. Another time, references to 54 green polypedates and 78 tadpoles meant 5 four-inch guns and 7 eight-inch guns. In the spring of 1911, Con returned to the Philippines where he expanded the notes and recollections into a massive report on the costal fortifications of Japan, including many charts, complete with detailed plans for invasion if American relations with Japan ever degenerated into war, as Con was sure they would.⁸¹⁰

Lucy was not ready to accept Con’s liquor drinking, and among his fellow officers he was famous for “Seoane punch,” which consisted of three-fifths Sauterne, one-fifth Pedros’ rum, and one-fifth brandy. Con and Will became brothers in heart as well as in law, and more than forty years later when Con published his autobiography, it carried a dedication to “my comrade and brother, Doctor William Seaman Bainbridge.”

Lucy was in a reflective mood, on September 4, 1916, thinking about the fact that the next day was her fiftieth wedding anniversary. She wrote her son, “I thank God for all the way He has led me, the dark places and the bright ones, for the chance to do good, to be busy and the many joys along the road.

“I thank God above all for having given me my boy. You have been and are my ‘strong staff.’ Do you remember when you were a tiny boy, you used to give me the sign we had that meant that?” Then she pondered what a responsibility it had been for Will to be her strong staff for so many years, knowing that his greatest weakness was a tendency to exhaust himself. “Please get a vacation — please let something drop next winter — please remember that you are close to the zenith and there is one, only one life here. Think of what you are to wife and sons and mother and the world’s work and save yourself for future years.”⁸¹¹

It was a time for memories. Lucy thought back to her work at the Mission Society, ended officially a decade before but continuing in her capacity as Honorary Superintendent of the Woman’s Branch. With the help of Will’s secretary, Miss Strelitz, she began assembling her recollections of those days into a book called Helping the Helpless in Lower New York and dedicated: “to my son who has ever been ‘my strong staff.’” In her introduction, she wrote, “I want my grandchildren, in the years to come, to know and to love the work their grandmother tried to do while she was here.”⁸¹² Each chapter was the story of one person or family that had been helped by the Woman’s Branch during the years when Lucy was in charge.

Several of the stories featured aspects of Lucy’s personal life, although she kept the Bainbridge family in the background. The third story is about Dora, the girl who lived with Lucy, Will, and Helen for more than a year in the early 1890s, to escape a sadistic mother. Ten years before writing Helping the Helpless, Lucy included the tale in her annual report, complete with a photograph of Dora and her husband, giving the most positive possible conclusion. But for the book, Lucy had to report further developments: “The young man, to whom Dora gave her heart, did not prove as true and steadfast as she could hope, and finally deserted her; but Dora’s Christian character has stood every test. She is now filling a good position in the far Southwest, yet ever longing to come once more to New York.”⁸¹³

Now Helen was united with Con, and Lucy could hope her marriage would fare better than Dora’s or her own. Already forty-three when she married, Helen was destined to remain childless. But June was pregnant again and on the first of April, 1917, she gave Lucy a granddaughter, Barbara.
The Great War
Just five days after Barbara’s birth the United States entered the war. The next day, Will reported for active duty at the U. S. Naval Hospital in New York,⁸¹⁴ and he began to organize a training course for a group of fifty-seven medical men entering the service. He filled his office with framed photographs of the family and prominent friends, including Cardinal Mercier, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Malines in Belgium. Lucy’s portrait hung on the wall directly behind his desk, just inches from his eyes as he worked.⁸¹⁵

At the request of Vice Admiral Albert Gleaves, who would command the operations convoying the American forces across the Atlantic, he organized a training class for naval corpsmen.⁸¹⁶ The men were instructed in the rudiments of medicine needed in war, from operating room technique to embalming of corpses; a number later became professional embalmers. On August 15, Will received orders to report for duty aboard the George Washington, a captured German liner that had just been repaired after extensive sabotage.

Con Seoane was already a career army officer, and he became chief of the Bureau of Aircraft Production. A year earlier, June’s nephew Walter, a nineteen-year-old Harvard sophomore, volunteered for the American Ambulance Corps in Paris, won the Croix de Guerre for saving wounded under heavy shell fire, and then joined the Navy to chase German submarines as soon as the United States had entered the war.⁸¹⁷ June’s younger brother, Ernest, had been a member of training companies of the New York Regiment, was commissioned Captain of the Infantry in August 1917, and served stateside in various troop training and inspecting positions.⁸¹⁸

On November 16, 1917, Lucy and June waved down from the front window of the Gramercy apartment as Will departed for a three-day trial cruise on the George Washington.⁸¹⁹ The crew practiced with the guns, and the medical staff inspected supplies and equipment. Back in harbor, Will scrambled to tidy up loose ends of his private practice and complete the intensive training course for hospital corpsmen.

The first Sunday morning in December, the family visited Glenheim, and Will enjoyed “a dear time with Mother on the way to Yonkers. A talk of the future. Of joy that the cemetery lot had been secured. We talked calmly of where we would like to lie.” They had gone to Woodlawn cemetery to select a burial place, on a knoll facing the east so the rising sun could touch the earth over their graves, and the body of William Folwell Bainbridge was moved there as if to prove that Lucy had always remained a respectable married woman.⁸²⁰ Lucy discussed the legal and financial arrangements with her son, all on a positive note with not a depressing word exchanged between them. He had arranged for fresh flowers to be delivered regularly to June and Lucy while he was away.

Will embraced his son Billy, not yet quite four years old, as the boy said prayers. “Billy,” he said, “please take care of Grandma B.” His son seemed to understand, and promised he would take care of Lucy. Tiny Barbara was so jolly, that Will felt strengthened. He pondered how the children would feel with him away, and he thought to himself, “I have missed the tender care and protecting arm of a father most of my life. I had hoped to make up this to my own.” Back at Gramercy, Will spared a few minutes from the family farewells to write letters that his secretary, Miss Webb, would hold and give to June and Lucy in case he never returned from the war. The next day, June and Lucy accompanied Will on the ferry to Hoboken. When the ticket-seller saw their thoughtful faces, he gripped Will’s hand and said, “Good luck!”

All day, the George Washington loaded nearly six thousand passengers, including the staff of a base hospital from Indianapolis, sixty nurses, fifty aviators, and six generals, plus the nearly one thousand personnel of the ship itself. This was believed to be the largest number of human beings ever to crowd aboard a single vessel. Some of the friends Will made among the officers doubted that the ship was ready, and he learned that it was leaking badly around the propellor shaft. Perhaps the army command had this in mind when it decided to send primarily “colored” soldiers across on this first voyage. As Will tended the health needs of these African-American men, often handing out apples from the two barrels he had brought, he developed great respect for their courage, dedication, and religiousness. He found one “young man in the bowels of the ship reading the New Testament and trying to find from it, the rightness of the war. I told him he should go to the Old Testament, for we are not yet up to the New Testament.”⁸²¹