The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (23 page)

The “medicals” found
their
Paris quite as inspirational as would the Americans who came to write or paint or study or imbibe in ideas in other fields. In Paris they felt the exhilaration of being at the center of things, as Wendell Holmes tried to convey to his father:

I never was so busy in my life. The hall where we hear our lectures contains nearly a thousand students and it is every day filled to overflowing. … The whole walls around the École de Médecine are covered with notices of lectures. … The lessons are ringing aloud through all the great hospitals. The students from all lands are gathered. …

“Not a day passes,” declared James Jackson, “that I do not gain something new in itself or something old with renewed force.”

Of great importance, in addition to the hospitals and the lectures, was the library at the École with its 30,000 volumes. (By comparison, the library at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York City had all of 1,200 volumes. The library at the Harvard Medical School had fewer still.) There were, besides, the world-renowned exhibits and lectures nearby at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes. One enthusiastic medical student, Levin Joyce from Virginia, likened the museum at the Jardin to a great buffet banquet of knowledge. “What a feast is here presented …!”

“By the blessing of God you shall never have reason to repent that you have sent me here,” a grateful Henry Bowditch wrote to his parents. Like Warren, Holmes, and numbers of other medical students, Bowditch was making a point to attend lectures at the Sorbonne as well.

Bowditch had embarked on a medical career far from sure it was right for him. He entered Harvard Medical School with feelings of doubt mixed with repugnance at the thought of some of the elementary work necessary. The change had begun when an instructor in anatomy at Harvard showed him, during a dissection, the arrangement of muscles in a forearm.

Bowditch was another of those with an illustrious father. He was the son of Nathaniel Bowditch, the self-taught astronomer and mathematician who in 1802, after sailing much of the world, had published
The New American Practical Navigator
, which made his name known everywhere. A well-mannered, intelligent-looking young man with an active sense of humor, he worked hard and caught on quickly. Any squeamishness he may have felt about exercises in dissection had long since disappeared. Finding at the end of a day at the dissecting table that there was more he wished to examine, he put a lung under his hat and walked out, past the guard at the door, all going well as he proceeded through the streets until he felt blood trickling down his face.

James Jackson’s friendship was a godsend to Bowditch. Jackson was the trailblazer, the guiding spirit, the one, they were all certain, destined to make a great mark in time to come. Jackson “devotes himself heart and soul to his profession,” he wrote. “I love him much.”

Jackson made sure Bowditch was headed in the right direction, stressing especially that he attach himself to Pierre Louis. Great as was Jackson’s admiration for the eloquent Gabriel Andral, he had come to idolize Louis as the “Master of the Age” in diagnosis. Jackson saw that Bowditch was introduced to Louis first thing and included in Louis’s rounds at La Pitié, which attracted a much smaller following than the rounds of more popular physicians. Where several hundred made the rounds with Dupuytren at the Hôtel Dieu, those with Louis at La Pitié might number fifteen at most, and Louis sensibly started later in the morning when the light was better.

When Holmes arrived in the spring of 1833, Jackson looked after him as well.

There was rarely a letup in the work, and never a shortage of additional opportunities to be pursued. “The days are so much occupied as to fly past almost like shadows,” wrote Mason Warren, for whom a greatly increased facility with French had made a world of difference. With so many fields of study open, he tried to pursue all he could. He attended lectures on syphilis, observed operations at the Hôpital des Vénériens. He went several times to the Hôpital des Enfants Malades to hear talks on whooping cough, measles, and chicken pox. The diseases of children presented “an entire new field for examination,” Warren wrote with enthusiasm. He sat in on lectures in chemistry at the Sorbonne. For a month he was engaged in “some very interesting experiments” on the intestines of dogs. He took up the study of skin diseases at the Hôpital Saint-Louis and followed with increasing interest the work of a German physician, Jules Sichel, in diseases of the eyes. “I was at a soirée at his house last night, at which there were four languages spoken,” he wrote to his father.

And, importantly, he enrolled in a private course of lectures given by a
sage-femme
, a noted obstetrician, Madame Marie-Louise La Chapelle, in which students learned to examine with their fingers the wombs of pregnant women and came to understand a great deal more than they ever had about labor pains and the birth of a child. Madame LaChapelle was held in the highest regard by her students. Bowditch was to say he learned more of “midwifery” from Madame La Chapelle in her private course than he had in three years at the Harvard Medical School. To Wendell Holmes she was a shining case in point of why women should not be excluded from a medical education.

Between times, Warren was making himself known among the medical booksellers, surgical-instrument makers, and the preparers of anatomical specimens to be found in and about the crooked side streets of the Latin Quarter. He was shopping mainly for his father. “I send you by ship sailing direct to Boston,” he wrote, “two boxes—a large one containing 50 to
60 specimens of morbid bones, some skulls … also the bones of the head separate.” “Will you tell me to what extent I am to go on in my purchases?” he asked another day. “I have already laid out eighty dollars for bones.”

On Sundays only, it appears, did Warren turn from work to the pleasures of Paris, when he, Jackson, Bowditch, Holmes, and others would cross the Seine to attend the opera or theater, and dine at their favorite Trois Frères Provençaux, where “full of warm blood, of mirth, of gossiping” (in Warren’s words), they delighted in
soupe à la Ture
or
côtelettes à la provençale
or any number of other
spécialités
as well as a favorite Burgundy.

Warren even departed from the usual professional content of his letters home to report that Taglioni’s performance in the ballet
La Sylphide
was wonderful beyond description. Another night, he attended a grand ball given by the most prominent American banker in Paris, Samuel Welles of Boston, in a mansion on the Place Saint-Georges, as brilliant an event as the young man had ever beheld. The host was the Welles of Welles & Company on the rue Taitbout, where Warren and the other Bostonians posted their mail.

One Sunday, Warren joined a great crowd gathered to watch a statue of Napoleon being placed atop the column in the Place Vendôme. Another day, at midweek, he sat in on a session of the Chambre des Députés, at which Lafayette was present looking very “sad on finding himself so entirely duped by the King.”

There is no doubt that if Lafayette had wished he could have been chosen president and established a republic [Warren informed his father]. Although at present he does everything in his power to show his devotion to the Republican party, he is looked upon by many of them with an evil eye.

Though the world of French politics impinged little on the day-to-day lives of the American medical students, some, like Warren and Holmes, made an effort to keep abreast of what was in the newspapers and the increasing “grumbles” over Louis-Philippe, and in part because they knew
how great was the interest in all this at home. “There is a notion that the old gentleman, who is said to be a cunning fellow, has slackened a little in his zeal for the liberal principles,” wrote Holmes of Louis-Philippe. “The papers talk without the slightest ceremony about his defection from the principles of the Revolution of July.

The King is caricatured without mercy. If you have ever seen his portrait, you know that he has a narrow forehead and large fat cheeks. This has been ingeniously imitated by the outline of a pear—so that on half the walls of Paris you will see a figure like this [outline of a pear] done in chalk or charcoal. …

It was very likely, Holmes thought, that in the course of time the French would have a “sober revolution” and a republic.

To ease his mind from work and take a little exercise, Holmes liked to roam about “using my eyes to see everything life had to show.” He loved the broad paths and open sky of the nearby Luxembourg Gardens, and to walk by the Seine, where he felt closest to the essence of Paris. Just to stand on the Pont Neuf and gaze at the river, its passing boats and barges, was, he said, all the occupation one could ask for in an idle hour.

Bowditch preferred the Jardin des Plantes, where in good weather he walked mornings and evenings, often reading Virgil. Bowditch was the only one of the Bostonians known to have had a serious love affair in Paris, but then Bowditch was said to have been of an “impulsive, ardent, and romantic disposition.” His heart had been won by Olivia Yardley from England, who was finishing her education in Paris and lived nearby in the Latin Quarter.

The one hint that Holmes paid the least attention to the numerous young women of the Latin Quarter is a wistful little poem titled “La Grisette.” Whether he wrote it at the time or later is not clear.

Ah, Clemence! When I saw thee last

Trip down the rue de Seine,

And turning, when thy form had past,

I said, “We meet again,”

I dreamed not in that idle glance

Thy latest image came

And only left to memory’s trance

A shadow and a name.

Another medical student, Louis Frazee from Kentucky, would later write in a book he published about his time in Paris that it was perfectly acceptable for a student to live on the most intimate terms “with his
grisette
in many of the hotels, without giving offense to the landlord or landlady.” A
grisette
could visit a young man’s room whenever she pleased, and stay as long as she pleased.

But of the many surviving firsthand accounts by American medical students, only one diary chronicles in brief but candid detail some off-hours carousing of a kind in which more than a few undoubtedly indulged but never mentioned in what they wrote. In the 1840s young Philip Claiborne Gooch of Richmond, a graduate of the University of Virginia, wrote in his diary in not very good French of countless hours at the billiard tables, of nights playing cards, and getting drunk on champagne and cognac. (In one such session, Gooch duly noted, he and a friend consumed a bottle of cognac each.) He wrote of visiting brothels and of vicious hangovers, but also of working diligently at the hospitals and his studies all the while.

Gooch took up with a
grisette
named Clementine, while a friend named Theodore favored another, Emeline, both of whom, it seems, were dancers. “I worked all day,” Gooch recorded in one diary entry, the rest of which he devoted to dinner and events following that evening.

I uncork the bottle of champagne. Theodore begins to eat. We drink. I take Emeline, who has the shivers, in my arms and put her on her knees. We kiss. We start to cry. They kiss. We kiss also. She says
tu toi
. I say
tu
… The familiar form. We are friends. The three bottles of champagne are empty. We are warm. The cognac flows. Emeline is drunk. We put her to bed. The three of us drink some more. Everyone goes to bed and—and—what follows …