Harvard Yard (38 page)

Caleb thought that now would be the time to return a certain volume. He could slip the Shakespeare manuscript into a pile, or he could do it more publicly, in that he had committed to living by hard decisions. But the day was too busy for him to go looking for books, and by evening, other matters had taken his attention.

About nine o’clock, twelve hundred men were drawn up on Cambridge Common to hear Harvard’s president, Reverend Samuel Langdon, deliver a prayer. Then, behind masked lanterns, the men took to the Charlestown Road. Their destination was secret, but Caleb guessed that it would be Bunker Hill.

The next morning, the people of Boston were shaken in their beds by the concussion of a naval broadside. Several seconds later, the blast rattled windows in Cambridge, and the Battle of Bunker Hill was begun.

By nightfall, a pile of limbs lay by the door of Elmwood, and a dozen wounded men lay in every room. Lieutenant Governor Oliver had long since fled, and his home was now a hospital. Caleb Wedge, apprentice to Dr. John Warren, was in the dining room, beneath a smoky lantern, putting his study to practice.

“This one’s lucky,” said Warren, who had the same confidence of manner that characterized his brother, Joseph. “He’s passed out.” Warren looked into the patient’s face. “Why . . . a classmate.”

Caleb said, “Pratt, isn’t it?”

“Horace Taylor Pratt, a general pain in the arse”—Warren lifted Pratt’s arm—“with a specific pain in the elbow.”

Such coincidences had become the norm rather than the exception.

“First,” said Warren, “probe the wound. A finger is best. It allows you to feel the damage.” He put his little finger into the hole in the patient’s elbow. “There’s jagged bone. The elbow is shattered. The arm must come off. You’re going to do it.”

“Me? I’m not ready.”

In other rooms men could be heard screaming, crying out, whimpering.

“Tutor Wedge”—Warren was small and slender, but there was an intensity in his eyes, deepened by the emotions of that day—“my brother went on the hill today. He has not returned. I am driven near distraction. If I can do my duty, so can you.”

Warren then wrapped a tourniquet around the patient’s upper arm and told Caleb to take the amputation knife. “Wipe the blood off the blade, then cut to the bone, in a circular motion, while I hold the arm.”

The patient rolled his head from side to side.

“He stirs,” said Warren. “Be quick.”

And Caleb made the cut, then grabbed the bone saw and placed it against the humerus while Warren held back the flesh and muscle of the patient’s upper arm. In four swift strokes, Caleb was through and the arm came off.

Horace Taylor Pratt awoke with a scream.

“Congratulations, Tutor Wedge,” said Warren, “you are now a doctor.”

“Give me back my arm,” said Pratt.

One hundred and twenty-seven rebels died at Bunker Hill, among them Warren’s brother. But there was little time to mourn, for there were near three hundred wounded, and hundreds more falling ill every day in the great semicircle of camps around Boston.

So many men had collected so quickly that they were digging new necessaries each week, so many men that a single college chamber was now occupied by eight or ten soldiers and rough barracks were rising in the Yard and on the Common, so many men packed so closely together that a few with smallpox might bring down the whole army.

Such problems would have challenged doctors educated at Edinburgh or Padua. How much greater, then, was the challenge for men like John Warren and Caleb Wedge, self-taught medicos who spent hours discussing the sources of sickness, the movement of disease from man to man, and the defenses they might put up?

They were standing outside Elmwood on a rainy July afternoon, musing over the effects of summer humidity on camp fever, when they were distracted by a commotion on the road. Soon there appeared a pack of dogs, barking and snuffling, then a group of riders, and at their head, a tall man on a white horse, wearing a military-style coat of blue with buff facings. George Washington had arrived.

The story of the subsequent eight months of siege had as many subplots as players, but the story of Caleb’s part was simple. He served, and he learned. While the college was removed to Concord, he stayed with the army to continue his apprenticeship. And by March 17, when the British and the Loyalists took to their ships and left Boston, Caleb Wedge was called doctor by all.

And Dr. Wedge, who had been inoculated against smallpox many years before, was among the first to enter the city after the British left.

He marched in with a detachment of General Greene’s Rhode Islanders and was shocked to see so many majestic trees reduced to stumps for firewood, even more shocked to see how haggard and melancholy the inhabitants looked as they came out to greet their liberators.

At Summer Street, Caleb fell out of line and hurried for the Cowgill house, his heart pounding, his head filled with fearful visions of disease and starvation. But before he had taken his hand from the knocker, the door swung open and he was greeted by the happiest smile he had ever seen. “Thank the Lord,” he whispered.

Christine threw herself into his arms and he pulled her against his body, and whatever hesitation he had felt, whatever calculations he had struggled with in his decisions of the heart, whatever uncertainties he might have known before he had seen men die from disease and wound, were all gone.

He turned her face to his and kissed her, his lanky body drawing warmth from hers.

When he stopped kissing her and looked into her eyes, he saw other eyes—those of her little brothers on the stairs, of her mother and father peering from the dining room. So he straightened himself, tugged on his waistcoat, and said, in the direction of the dining room, “Mr. Cowgill, I would beg the honor of your daughter’s hand in marriage.”

The door opened a bit wider, so that Mr. Cowgill’s face appeared. His hair had been turned gray by the siege, and he had lost three teeth. “When?”

“If your daughter will have a military sawbones, I would marry her tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” said Christine. “Why not tonight?”

There was a letter waiting for Caleb that day. It came from Lydia:

You know that I have no wish for exile, but Grandfather refuses to stay, and a man so old and broken cannot cross the Atlantic alone. The Townsend family has promised a welcome for their widowed daughter-in-law, and their manor in Northumberland will be at our disposal. But know that I am in sympathy with this cause. Someday, I shall return to taste the fruit of freedom, which I hope will be offered as willingly to my gender as to yours.

So, thought Caleb, Lydia would not be there to see him marry or march off with the Continental army, two events that occurred in short order.

On the night before the army departed for New York, he could not sleep. He lay beside his new wife and studied the shadows on the ceiling and wondered what would become of the fine house on Tory Row if he did not return. He had lived there during the siege because he had grown up there. But he did not own the house. It was still in the name of Reverend Abraham Wedge, departed Loyalist. So it would be subject to confiscation as soon as a commission was established.

Caleb considered it good news that one of the men on the commission was Professor Winthrop, who would see that Caleb’s service was taken into account when the fate of the house was determined. Still, there was no guarantee that the house and everything in it might not be handed over to the state and offered for sale.

Caleb rolled closer to Christine, asleep on her stomach. He placed his hand on her bottom, which had expanded nicely after two weeks of decent food, and he contemplated how terrible it would be to leave such pleasure. And the smooth softness of her flesh was enough to inflame him. So he let his hands slide down. . . .

“Caleb,” she said. “Caleb, what are you . . .”

“I perform love’s labors.”

And when they were done, he told her there was a book on love’s labors that he wanted her to know about.

“I need no picture books to show me the ways of love,” she giggled.

“’Tisn’t a picture book. ’Tis an ode to love’s labors.”

He lit a candle and led her past the rooms of the Continental officers who had taken up residence in the house, down to the study, to the third alcove and the third shelf. Behind a panel were two books, just as he had expected.

“You must know of this, in case we have done our last love’s labors together.”

“Don’t say that, Caleb.”

“The British have left Boston, but there’s much fighting yet.”

He pulled out the books and opened to the title page of one:
Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
And he gasped, “Good God!”

“Not a
picture
book,” said Christine. “A
word
book on dirty business.”

Caleb saw a note in the middle of the book. It was in Lydia’s hand: “The day will come when we need not do our research in barns or hide our books behind panels or leave our women to educate themselves. That day is not yet here, and so we hide our best until then. You see to your research. I will see to our books.”

“What about love’s labors?” asked Christine.

Caleb thought for a moment, put the note back into the book and put the books behind the panel, then he took her hand. “Better to perform them than read about them.”

vi

Dr. Caleb Wedge was proud that eight signers of the Declaration of Independence were Harvard men, and he was proud of an army that refused to quit through all the defeats and retreats of 1776. He marched with them in brutal heat and bitter cold, and it was the cold that finished him. Just after Trenton, he lost his left foot to frostbite.

By the spring of 1777, he was back in Boston, learning to walk again on a wooden foot fitted into a high boot and helping John Warren organize the Continental Massachusetts General Hospital. There they sought to understand how diseases passed from person to person, and though they felt that they had gone far toward stopping the spread of smallpox, they were still puzzled by other maladies.

They decided that the best way to understand the transmission of yellow fever would be to inhale the germ. So they cut a deck of cards, and it fell to Warren to place a glass tube over the nose and mouth of a yellow fever patient and breathe in the exhalations while Caleb set down the clinical observations. Warren remained healthy, so they concluded that summer heat and poor sanitation were the causes of the disease.

With several others, they founded the Massachusetts Medical Society and, in the new spirit of the times, initiated a series of lectures on human dissection. They no longer needed to be resurrectionists. Their subjects were the unclaimed bodies of soldiers who had died in the hospital. Their students were upperclassmen and faculty at the college and any man over twenty-one with an interest in physick.

When Caleb Wedge appeared for his first lecture and threw back a sheet, revealing the body of a man who had died from a gunshot, he heard a gasp. He looked out and said, “If we are to improve the lot of man, we must study man . . . his mind and body both.” And he wished that John Winthrop had lived long enough to see him step forward and perform dissections in the bright light of day.

Students who completed the lectures received a certificate, engraved by Paul Revere with images of Hippocrates and a physician making an incision in a dead body. It attested that the student had “attended a course of Anatomical Lectures and Demonstrations, together with Physiological and surgical dissertations at the Dissecting Theater in the American Hospital, Boston; whereby he has had an opportunity of procuring an accurate knowledge in the structure of the human body.”

Formal medical training had begun in New England.

On October 7, 1783, with the last battle of the Revolution a memory, Warren, Caleb, and two others went to the Cambridge Meeting House, swore themselves to be “of the Christian religion as maintained in the Protestant communion,” and were inaugurated as the first professors in the Medical Institution of Harvard University.

Caleb understood the oath. The candles of ignorance guttered, but it was important to reassure the ignorant that when a medical professor dissected a body, he did it with no dark intent. This was, after all, a society that had been hanging witches less than a century before.

Caleb also understood the importance of family and friends, for without them, nothing mattered. Christine and their children, Joseph and George, sat smiling before him. And there was the Tory tutor, Isaac Smith, who had stood where he thought he should . . . and the widow of John Hicks . . . and Horace Taylor Pratt, his first patient. And there were ghosts, too. Grandfather Abraham, who died an exile . . . William Brattle, who left the siege of Boston, sailed away to Halifax, sat down to his first good meal in over a year, and ate himself to death . . . John Winthrop . . . John Hicks . . . even a forgotten old actor called Burton Bones. The one person he missed was his sister.

But soon, a ship arrived from England, carrying a trunk, a flat wooden crate, and Lydia herself.

Letters had passed between them. Lydia knew the fate of the house—confiscated by the Massachusetts Commission, bought by Samuel Cowgill, given back to his daughter. Caleb knew of Lydia’s lonely exile in a manor in Northumberland, where she cared for a senile, sightless old man whose only joy came from her readings of the Bible and Shakespeare and his old commonplace book.

Caleb was in the study, preparing his first lecture on female anatomy, when there was a commotion at the front door and a cry of joy from Christine.

The supply of joy increased that night in proportion to the supplies of port, sweetmeats, cake, laughter, and tears. Everyone agreed that no one had aged a day, and all knew that it was a lie, except for the two little boys. They had already announced that Lydia was their new favorite aunt, then they went off to play with the lead soldiers she had brought for them.

It was not until the boys were bedded down that Lydia bid her brother help her to open the wooden crate. Inside was a painting, wrapped in heavy canvas.