Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

He was appalled at the poor living conditions below decks: hot, cramped, airless, smelly, many toilets inoperative for lack of water to flush them. He began coping with a range of diseases among the men: pneumonia, spinal meningitis, mumps, measles, appendicitis, influenza, and hundreds of colds. Wondering how sad his precious mother might be over the worrisome international news, Will kissed his photographs of Lucy, June, Billy, John, Barbara and Helen.

On the seventeenth, the George Washington was gripped by a terrible storm, which the captain would later call “the worst gale in eight years.”⁸²² One great wave smashed Will's X-ray machine, and another took away the stern lookout house with its rapid firing gun, two sailors and two soldiers. When the weather cleared, the ship lumbered along at four knots toward the harbor at Brest.

Will scurried around France, collecting information on developments in military medicine. Dr. Rivière showed him the reconstruction work on wounded soldiers, where everything was done to make the most of the damaged body, and they called on Dr. Tuffier, whom Will had first met at the 1906 cancer congress in Heidelberg, to see the Carrel-Dakin treatment applied to chest patients. Next Will went to Compiègne by boat up the Oise river, about a quarter of the way from Paris to the Belgian border to tour the Carrel hospital there. Returning for another load of soldiers, the George Washington had to hold speed down to eleven knots to conserve coal, because the plan had been to complete a round-trip of six thousand miles without refueling.

After ten in the evening, Will said goodnight to a group of officers with whom he had been chatting and went to bed. Suddenly, with a pair of overpoweringly loud bangs, the ship shook. The engine stopped. A whistle and the clanging of a gong sounded a general alarm. They must have been hit by torpedoes! Will donned life belt, buckled on pistol belt with canteen, seized binoculars, put on overcoat and gloves, looked quickly at the pictures of his dear ones, said a short prayer, and dashed off to the sick bay to get his patients into their life boat. The night was very dark, and a heavy sea surged. At any moment he expected another torpedo or shell fire. While the sick men shivered in the cold, Will learned there had actually been no submarine. Running without lights so the Germans could not spot them, they had struck the freighter Nyzam in an eastbound allied convoy. No one was injured on either ship, but one of the Nizam’s crew was pinned in his bunk by one corner of a hull plate which had been bent neatly down on top of him.

Immediately after reaching the United States, Will sent a telegram to Lucy who was at Hot Springs, Virginia. She was suffering with back trouble, what she called “the old burning,” and the cure offered by the hot springs was baths and rubbings, which might take another week to have a beneficial effect.

Will found an alarmingly dangerous situation at Gramercy Park. Lucy had received midnight telephone calls saying her son would not return alive and would be found on a slab in the morgue.⁸²³ The family was being followed.⁸²⁴ Anonymous letters in the mail said said that the three children would be killed. Notes dropped right outside the apartment door said the children’s eyes would be torn out. Will contacted the police department, and Captain Cornelius Willemse took the case.

In his autobiography, Willemse wrote, “Telephone messages, each more horrible than the last were coming in from pay stations all over the city and immediately I assigned some of my best men to watch the kiddies at their play in Gramercy Park where they romped unaware of the dangers that lurked about them. I covered the house day and night and spent all my spare time watching the youngsters myself. As the threats increased, I approached the case from every possible angle until it got on my nerves and I tried everything to trap the individuals concerned. We traced letters to various mailing points and phone calls to pay stations a considerable distance away, but the notes which appeared from the mysterious and threatening hand within the house itself had us baffled.”⁸²⁵

The family blamed the evil-doers from the Randall’s Island case, believing their vengeance had been delayed by the war. Willemse suspected an unidentified enemy Will might have made overseas, possibly one of the officers whose careers were wrecked when Will had exposed their illegal liquor business in France. Unsuccessful in trapping the harassers, Willemse told Will to send the children away to a secret location. From Hot Springs, Lucy wrote, “Let us all rejoice together that we are all safe and well. God has been good to us all. I look out on these hills and say ‘As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about His people.’”

When Lucy returned to Gramercy Park, she proudly showed Will the February 13, 1918 issue of The Outlook magazine containing a brief article she wrote about the three times she had seen Lincoln.⁸²⁶ Thus, in the middle of her seventies, Lucy had resumed her literary career. In a sense, this literary renaissance late in life was a gift from her son, who provided first Miss Strelitz and then Lillian E. Foster to take dictation and edit the manuscripts. Helping the Helpless in Lower New York had now been printed, and Will did everything he could to promote it.⁸²⁷ Clipping services gleaned a handful of brief but laudatory reviews from New York and Boston newspapers.⁸²⁸

The Baptist minister who had married William and Lucy, Augustus H. Strong, wrote from Pasadena, “You have done good service in printing it, for it is a touching and effective testimony to the value of humble work for Christ. It revives my memory of your sainted mother and father. With such parents you could hardly be a pitiless society woman, and with your Christian experience and training you could hardly fail to be a helper of the helpless. Your book is the simple record of unselfish Christian work for others. It will thrill many hearts and open many purses. Its plain but graphic narration of facts has many of the best qualities of style. There is literary skill in it, and you should stir up the gift that is in you.”⁸²⁹

Will lobbied his friends in Washington for the chance to carry out a more extensive inspection of allied medical facilities in Europe. Lucy commented, “What a time we are having in Washington! You will want to talk with Con about his affairs. He is a true, upright splendid man, and no graft where he controls.” June’s old friend, Walter Gifford, who had been appointed Director of the Council of National Defense after serving on the Naval Preparedness Board, told Will that Washington was “perfect bedlam.” Will's cousin, Bainbridge Colby, was a member of the United States Shipping Board and a personal favorite of President Woodrow Wilson. Both men were influential with the Navy, and their personal power is shown by the fact that Colby soon became Secretary of State, and Gifford, President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.⁸³⁰ The day after his own forty-eighth birthday, Will received orders from the Navy Department that would permit the grand tour of military medical facilities.

Once he got to Paris, Will wrote June to secure a cottage for the family, even if it cost $1,000 or as much as $1,200, and within a few weeks they had rented a place on Southfield Point near the water in Stamford, Connecticut.⁸³¹ There the children might be safe from the anonymous death threats.

The Germans began shelling Paris every fifteen minutes with a monstrous new gun. Will went to see the results. One of the shells exploded just ahead of him; had he been two minutes earlier, he would have been killed. “On the floor, nothing under her, a well dressed fine young French girl of about 18, dying, both legs blown off at the hips, right arm just below the elbow almost blown off, and again about gone just above the elbow. In agony and conscious. Pillow and freeing clothing of neck and a hypo to kill pain all one could do for a mass of dying humanity only a few minutes before happy and full of life.” The next day’s European edition of the New York Herald would have listed Will’s name among American red cross officials who had rendered assistance, but the military censor struck it from the story.

One of the shells struck a church. “It being Good Friday, there was an afternoon service attended specially by a large number of women and children. There were many first communicants all in pure white — like little angels with their simple faith and pure childish faces upturned to the Master of Life, the Conqueror over Death — the proud mothers, some soldier fathers and others. The gun, the shell through the roof, bursts inside and under a pile of masonry were 75 dead flattened out like butter on bread. Just a layer of organic matter between stone layers. About 100 more were injured. Terrible sight! I came soon after, and surely Hell is on Earth!” In his room in the Hôtel de Crillon at the Place de la Concorde, he lined up the photographs of Lucy, June, Billy, John, and infant Barbara, to have a family chat. “I am not alone because you all are here in thought as well as likeness. Love stretches out over space and holds tight.”⁸³²

While Will was seized by homesickness, back in New York the family faced a terrible new challenge. Helen underwent surgery for removal of a malignancy, without her brother's expert advice.⁸³³ On Sunday, April 14, Will arrived at Brest and received “First details of Helen’s operation. Oh! It nearly knocked me out. Poor girl! Poor Mother! Poor Con! Well, we are certainly getting a schooling in this life and no mistake! But we can do no more nor less than believe to the end in all things for our good. My heart aches tonight! My faith is strained!” Two days later he posted a cheery letter to June by a fast ship, mentioning nothing about Helen’s ordeal or his prognosis for her future. “This will be good news, I feel sure, from a far country. I am on the way home!”

But almost as soon as he had rejoined his mother, it was time to leave her again. At the end of April, Lucy went on the George Washington to inspect Will’s little hospital and to attend an afternoon tea given by Captain Pollock. She brought with her June, Nell Wheeler, Dr. Eliza Mosher, and three ladies in attendance. The Captain had intended the tea only for “immediate family” of his officers, and was thus irritated by the size of Lucy’s entourage.⁸³⁴ Everything was in a great rush, so three days later when Lucy and June drove Will over to Hoboken to join his ship, there was not time even to stop for lunch, and the ladies had to sustain themselves with eggs and milk they had brought along. In Will’s baggage were twenty-five copies of Helping the Helpless. On his way back to Europe, he wrote June, “Please urge Mother B. to get out in the air some exercise each day and a lot of ‘outdoorness’ in the car. The car is health and life to her and she should have first call on it.”⁸³⁵

When the George Washington reached Brest, Will quickly went over to London to begin inspection of British rehabilitation facilities, considering his freedom to chart his own course “a big chance for service.”⁸³⁶ The Captain who was chief of staff for Admiral William Sowden Sims coolly told him to expect an order to return immediately to Brest. “Here I am with great chances before me and seemingly to have all hit in the head. Hard to feel that influence may be after you all the time.” Exactly what was going on never became clear. As late as 1930, Will would still be troubled by what he saw as a conspiracy against him among certain naval officers, perhaps even including admirals Sims and Wilson, that had sullied his good name. Sims was certainly a formidable character, and to hear Sims tell it he had practically won the Great War singlehanded.⁸³⁷

At one point in 1918, the U.S. Naval Headquarters in London cabled Washington to have Will yanked home. He theorized that officers in London had decided he was a spy. If he was not an agent of the Huns, perhaps he was spying on Sims for the admiral's stateside enemies. One of the men demoted in the liquor gang Will had smashed was a doctor named Vickery who was close to Admiral Wilson. Or perhaps his secret enemy was once again the New York surgical establishment, including the “jealous crowd” of doctors he beat out when he became honorary president of the 1906 Heidelberg cancer conference or who had been on the other side in the Randall’s Island investigations.

Will mobilized support among his allies, including Sir Thomas H. Goodwin, Director General of the British Army Medical Service. Fresh orders promptly came from the Navy Department in Washington extending his stay another month. The first part of June, he visited the British forces on the Belgian front in Flanders, and one morning he came under German fire while collecting an ornately-carved stone cross from the rubble of a church.⁸³⁸ By the end of the third week of June, Will was so pleased with the progress of his tour, that he withdrew a request for more time. In Rouen, he wrote Lucy, “I am counting the days until we meet.”⁸³⁹ On his final voyage aboard the George Washington, a German submarine fired a torpedo at the ship, but by pure chance another member of the convey got in the way and was sunk instead.⁸⁴⁰

Home Safely
Lucy was reunited with her son at Stamford, with the two little boys standing at salute in sailor suits and French caps. “Oh! Such a welcome! Safe at home!” They invited Cornelius Willemse to a joyful family reunion, where Lucy personally thanked the police captain for protecting them. Will repaid Willemse by saving a gangster’s mother from cancer so her adoring boy would feed information to Willemse that allowed him to break the murderous Dropper and Augie gangs.⁸⁴¹

Lucy examined the fascinating mementos Will had brought back from the Great War, including his collection of gas masks and the stone cross from the devastated Belgian church. Her mind turned to her own war experience fifty-five years before. A photograph of her “Ohio Relief Committee” badge illustrated reminiscences she wrote for The Outlook, along with a photograph of herself made in the winter of 1863-1864. Shrouded in a dark coat, face framed by a fur-lined bonnet tied under her chin, she gazed at the camera with sensitive eyes, an expression on her lips that mixed tenderness with strength. The title she chose for the essay suggested intimacy and sainthood: “Sister Ohio.”⁸⁴²

In the heat of August, Consuelo Seoane sat in his room in the Hotel La Salle, to write Lucy a painful letter. “Dear ‘Mother B.’ Helen died today. As her husband I should like to tell you, her mother, that I considered her as near the perfect type of ‘companion to man’ as it is possible for me to conceive. You are aware of the general qualities that endeared her to her many friends and therefore these need no mention from me. I would rather speak of our own intimate life that only she and I knew. Our thoughts and plans always agreed and we lived in a communion of happiness. She enjoyed all pleasures; was comforting in distress and ever working to push our common end. Her ability and intellect coupled with an ever-blossoming smile brought friends and admirers wherever she went. It made me very proud of her. In picturesque language she could have brought the world almost to her feet. But had such a thing come to her she would, I know, have passed it right over to me. Can I say anything more to describe so unselfish and perfect a sweetheart? Her longing and prayers for children were never answered but she was a friend of the little ones and children never failed to flock around her.” In closing, he wished that Lucy might keep his note as testimony to the great loss they shared, and signed it, “Your loving son, Con.”⁸⁴³ Helen came home to Thirty-Four, to lie for a last few hours surrounded by her family: husband, brother, sister-in-law, two nephews, her niece, and her mother.⁸⁴⁴
Analysis
Scientific progress has not yet obviated the human need for religion, and it may never do so. If any surgeon in the world could save baby Elizabeth, it was her father, Will. But he failed, so the family turned to its Christian faith to compensate their loss. Many social scientists have believed that science-driven secularization would soon sweep aside what they considered to be the primitive "superstitions" of religion. But this has not happened.⁸⁴⁵

When Will was caught up in Lane's fad to improve the geometry of patients' intestines surgically, he thought he was applying effective treatments to an objective disease. Later generations of medical scientists decided that this was an illusion. Will's research papers demonstrate that he understood the placebo effect, but he did not recognize that the apparent benefit of the operation was merely the positive reaction of his patients to medical compensators.

We use the term "magic" to refer to specific compensators based on assumptions that are unproven or false. Religious salvation from death is a very general compensator, and a promise of medical cure from irregulat digestion is a specific compensator. Religion provides some specific compensators, especially in higher tension groups that compensate members for their low status in society, but the fundamental function of religion is to compensate humans for lack of the very most general and valuable rewards. Thus, magic can be based upon supernatural assumptions, but it need not be. Unproven medical fads are a form of magic, even if the doctors themselves would angrily reject the term.

Will's motives for promoting Lane's magical methods were intimately connected with his need for glory and his desire to be an attractive exchange partner for wealthy patients who could afford surgery merely to improve their digestions. His failure to save his own child turned his existing interesdt in Lane's ideas into an obsession. He could not save Elizabeth by operating on her digestive tract, but he would prove his competence by repairing the inner flaws of hundreds of adults. Once again, we see the dynamics of secondary compensation.

Will had a sacred responsibility to protect his daughter, and given his success in competing with other surgeons to use spinal analgesia with the smallest child, he could not transfer that responsibility to a colleague. Many years later, his son Bill contracted periotinitis and insisted that his father do the necessary operation personally.⁸⁴⁶ But in failing to save Elizabeth, Will defaulted on his responsibilities to her, to her mother, and to Lucy. By acknowledging God's superior power, and calling Elizabeth a bud from his June rose transplanted to Heaven, Will employed secondary compensation, passing responsibility to his Lord. He did the same when he prayed before every operation.

The reason for Elizabeth's death was kept a family secret until this moment. Few patients expect a doctor to succeed all the time, but the case of this surgeon's baby who was just beyond the limits of his skill to save is so ironically pathetic, that it could not have helped his reputation.

The best surgeons could do a long list of things to the human body, and patients presented a long list of complaints. The challenge was to determine which items in both lists could profitably be linked. Patients would entrust their lives and their dolalrs to Will, in exchange for treatments. Often h met his responsibility directly by providing a valuable medical reward. Sometimes he provided mere magic and at best achieved secondary compensation.

Chapter 11:

Bethel
In the heat of her seventy-eighth summer, Lucy sailed with her family to Squirrel Island, off the coast of Maine, a rough voyage through darkness and storm-tossed waters that made everybody very sick. There she presided over the religious development of her grandsons in a big house staffed by the full retinue of servants. When Billy asked, “How many miles to Heaven, Grandma,” she assured him it was close by.

After gazing quietly into the night sky, tiny John told her, “I know about the moon. It is made of jelly fish.” Lucy asked, “Who told you that?” “Nobody,” he answered, “I thinked it, Grandma.” She told him that God had made the moon, and God had made him, too. John puzzled over this for a moment, and commented, “I don’t see how he makes blood. How can he? I spose he takes a little bit of lots of things and just mixes them up.” With youthful optimism, he planted some watermelon seeds, and by the end of the vacation he was proud to show Lucy that they had sprouted.

Billy was not entirely pleased at his younger brother’s display of intellectual precocity, and proclaimed, “John, you won’t be a man for twenty years!”

“Yes I will, too!”

“No you won’t, John, sure!”

Lucy interjected, “You sure, Billy?”

“Yes, I know it’ll be twenty years.”

John pondered the prospect of waiting so long to become a man, and wondered if there were a lesser goal he could achieve more expeditiously. With sad decision he said, “I’ll be a woman.”

Lucy thought this was hilarious and wrote her son, “Thank God, dear Will, for these children.” Every summer, they escaped the unhealthy heat of New York City, to rent rooms at Chautauqua or visit with friends. Again Lucy dreamed of a cottage of their own, like the one back at Warwick Neck so long ago. “A place in the country is now a first duty, what is best for them, their upbuilding, physical, mental and spiritual.” She doubted whether she herself would live to experience it, however. “Bear in mind that just as we have worked together and borne burdens together and enjoyed together, that there is no break and when I may be called away to the other room of the Father’s House, which is being prepared for me, it is not a separation. It is just one Home and I shall be close by.”⁸⁴⁷

That year Lucy published her third book, Jewels from the Orient. It was series of twenty-four vignettes of the missionaries she had met on her first world tour in China, Japan, Burma, India and Syria, drawn from the talks she had given on the lecture circuit a third of a century earlier. This was essentially the book she failed to complete in the mid-1880s, which she had intended to title, Glimpses of Mission Life in Many Lands. It drew its theme from the insight Lucy gained in her second world tour: “Although customs and costumes, language and life are so widely different in the Orient from our own, we may feel confident that the Bible is the one book for all tongues and all peoples. There is one God over all, unto whose Son, the Lord, Jesus Christ, has been given all power in Heaven and on earth, therefore are we commanded to go unto all nations with the Gospel, knowing that ‘He is with us alway, even unto the end of the world.’”⁸⁴⁸

International Glory
The summer of 1921, the family rented a place at the end of Havemeyer Lane on Palmer’s Hill in Stamford, Connecticut, called “The House in the Trees.” A dog came with it, and young Billy got a toy wagon, made a harness, and the willing animal pulled him all around. June was learning to drive on a Dodge touring car that bucked terribly because she couldn't handle the clutch. Will, who let a chauffeur do his driving for him, watched in dismay.

A month later, Will and Lucy “motored in” to take afternoon tea at the Prince George, and talk about his coming trip to Belgium. On a New Orleans street car he had made the acquaintance of Major Jules Voncken, from the army medical corps of Belgium, and the two decided “to assemble the military doctors in meetings where they could develop their international solidarity.”⁸⁴⁹ Will’s Report on Medical and Surgical Developments of the War had been a great success. Published as a special issue of the United States Naval Medical Bulletin, it convinced the Europeans, if not Will’s American colleagues, that he was a world leader of military medicine.⁸⁵⁰ Now, he was on his way to the historic first Congrès International de Médecine et de Pharmacie Militaires, the only American and thus de facto representative of his nation, even though the government gave him no official support.