 | CHAPTER V Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
5. CHAPTER V
Now that the war was over, young Lieutenant William
Richardson Abbot thought, he could get on with his work. His
father had been a scholar, a gentleman and a schoolmaster; he,
he trusted, would be another.
Educated at his father's academy near Washington, and
at Georgetown College and Military Academy, young Abbot had at-
tended the University of Virginia, where for his brilliance he
had been given an honorary master's degree on his graduation in
1857. Three pleasant years of teaching ended with the outbreak of the Civil War
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at Richmond. Irked by the safety of his work, he later enlisted
for active service, and was assigned to the First Regiment En-
gineers. His engineers -it was a source of undying pride to him -
had fired the last volley at Appomattox; then they had surrendered and
he, like the other officers, had been paroled.
Soldiering had been his duty, not his choice, and he was
glad to get back to his business. The South might be defeated, but
there were always children to educate, boys of whom to make men.
The country that had the finest men, he believed, was in the end
the strongest country. So in the fall of 1865 Mr. Abbot opened,
with Major Horace Jones, a day school for boys at Charlottesville,
the Charlottesville Institute.
* * *
Mr. Reed had been worrying about his sons' education.
“I'm a poor man, Ma,” he had said. “I don't see how I'm
to give those boys the education they should have.”
“Everybody's poor now,” his wife had reminded him. “I
hope we can manage to send them to the University, too, but if we
can't I shan't be too distressed. There's no finer man in the
whole world than their Pa,” she told him proudly, “and he didn't
go to college.”
“Hush, Ma,” Pa said, smiling, “you'll turn my head.
But,” he continued, “if we could live at Charlottesville, half our
problem would be solved. Then the boys could live at home instead
of boarding at the University.”
“Why don't you to talk to the bishop about it? It's
time for us to move on, anyway.”
Lemuel Reed was a modest man. He did not feel that he
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it. But four boys, every one of them a fine fellow and deserving
the best education available! Finally and with reluctance he told
the bishop that, should there be an opening in a town having good
educational facilities, he would appreciate being considered for
it, for the sake of his sons. He was overjoyed when he was ap-
pointed Presiding Elder of the Charlottesville district.
So it happened that, when Mr. Abbot opened his school,
young Walter Reed was one of some thirty boys who attended it.
A mile or so of red mud separated the Charlottesville
Institute from the University of Virginia, but the path led straight
from the one to the other. Indeed, it was the single aim of all the
classical schools in the state at that time to fit boys to pursue
advanced studies at Mr. Jefferson's celebrated University. The
courses of study at these schools were almost identical: Latin,
Greek, mathematics, history, a modern language, and often a
science course taught from a text book, without laboratory work.
Walter by now was an excellent linguist, well advanced
in the classical languages; strangely, however, considering his
later choice of medicine as a profession, he had no particular in-
terest in science. But perhaps it was not so strange that the fu-
ture doctor, whose consuming desire was to relieve suffering wherev
wherever he found it, was unmoved by scientific study, drily pre-
sented between cardboard covers and applying, so far as he could
see, only indirectly to human problems.
The schoolmaster immediately liked his young pupil. The
boy, he found, had a sound, keen mind, and enthusiasm for learning.
Moreover, he had a gracious and winning personality: gaiety without
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a warm and considerate nature.
Walter, in turn, was deeply impressed by this man with
the erect bearing and vigorous intellect, whose formality was tem-
pered with friendliness. All the boys were impressed by him, and
imitated him in little ways. They cultivated his manner of speak-
ing, tried to copy his incisive handwriting, and laboriously
trained their hair to fall, like his unmanageable forelock, over
their foreheads.
The schoolmaster's discipline wa with his boys was aus-
tere; it was more austere with himself. A teacher, in his opinion,
should have a wide and thorough training to be worthy of his calling.
But enthusiasm was the first essential. Mr. Abbott had a way
of expressing himself in telling aphorisms. “Who was ever con-
vinced,” Walter remembered his saying, “by one who did not feel
the truth? What mind was ever lighted up or warmed by that which
was dark and cold?”
Under the Virginia schoolmaster Walter learned his lessons
well; he learned also principles of teaching which, thirty years
later, were to come back to him in all their force and make him a
teacher worthy of his old preceptor.
* * *
Metropolitan Charlottesville, with its five thousand in-
habitants, half-dozen churches, stores, daily paper, Court House
and cobbled streets, amazed the boy from the slow-paced rural to-
bacco towns of mid-Virginia by its urban bustle; but it did not
distract him from his object. He was anxious to get to the Univer-
sity and begin his professional training, in what field he had not
yet decided. He owed it to Pa and Ma to become self-supporting as
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people,” as he had hesitantly expressed it to Joey, made him want
to get out into the world without waste of time.
In the roomy brick house in Charlottesville life shifted
back to its pleasant pre-war routine, a routine which Walter had
almost forgotten. He worked hard for Mr. Abbot, and stood close
to the head of his class; he listened tirelessly to his elder
brother's accounts of that Mecca of all Virginia students, the Uni-
versity; sometimes he made short trips with Pa, or tramped with
Chris over the rolling green hills surrounding Charlottesville.
The pleasant, profitable fall gave way to winter, and the
time passed rapidly -almost like a happy dream, Walter thought,
looking backward sorrowfully, shaken by his first major grief.
Early in February, 1866, Mrs. Reed died, leaving her family, in
their first shock, unable to see how they would get along without
her. Ma, with her sympathy and humor, her inexhaustible energy
and patience and enterprise, had more than anyone else made the
family a closely united one.
The effect of her death on Walter was to make him apply
himself even more closely to his studies. ItHer death brought home to himWalter
jarringly the knowledge that the span of a life is relatively short.
If he was to accomplish anything worth while in the world in which
so much needed to be done, he had no time to lose.
He worked with extra diligence the rest of that session,
and again the following. At the end of the second he was ready to
enter the University -except for one thing, and that was beyond
his control. He was under the required age. He decided, however,
to try. The authorities were doubtful. They conceded that there
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he not been in the hands of their own Mr. Abbot? But, they thought,
it was unwise to accept so young a student, a mere boy. Finally,
perhaps on his schoolmaster's recommendation, they consented to admit
him.
In the fall of 1867, Walter Reed, barely sixteen, entered the
University of Virginia.
* * *
The shade of Thomas Jefferson still lingered almost visibly
over the University he had founded nearly half a century
earlier. Although for more than forty years he had been lying in
the little family burial plot on the shaggy Virginia
hillside crowned by his beloved home, Monticello, professors and
students respectfully alluded to “Mr. Jefferson” almost as though
he might any day ride in again, as he had on his last visit, to con-
sult with Mr. William Wertenbaker, the librarian, about cataloguing
some new books.
The University was peculiarly the product of his versatile
genius. Not only had he planned its first curriculum, engaged its
original faculty and shaped its policies, but also he had designed
and erected its buildings. The Rotunda, adapted from the Roman
Pantheon, and the flanking pavillions, modelled after Roman temples
and baths, suggested the great democrat's admiration for the sturdy,
uncorrupted republic of Rome.
A strong unanimity of feeling existed among both students and
professors. They were united not so much by their lost cause -that
was history now -as by the resolution to do everything in their
power to restore the prostrated South ofto economic and political
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professional men had been killed. Those who were left had much to
do. The student body was more than usually serious, too, for an-
other reason: all of them had grown up among the sobering
hardships of the war, and a number, especially in the professional
schools, were young men in their middle twenties who had interrupted
their training to fight through the four years. A few, like Jim,
had a missing arm or leg, a limp or a patch over the eye, to testi-
fy to their service.
The faculty were worthy successors to those men whom Mr.
Jefferson had picked to conform to his exacting ideal of the good
teacher. Walter now studied Greek with Dr. Basil Lanneau Gilder-
sleeve, considered the finest Greek scholar in the country, and
author of the Latin grammar he had used as a child. Dr. Gildersleeve's
cutaway and silk hat, his full black beard and mustache, his limp
from a battle wound -he had taught during the sessions, fought
through the vacations -made him one of the most distinguished fig-
ures at the University, while his erudition and good-humored witti-
cisms made him a popular teacher. The unimposing appearance of
Walter's professor of history and literature, Dr. George Frederick
Holmes, did little to suggest his scholarship and ability. Habitu-
ally garbed in an ill-fitting cutaway and shapeless pantaloons, with
his neck in the grip of a badly knotted cravat, he always conveyed
the impression of being in a great hurry, as he strode along, gray
whiskers flying and gold-rimmed spectacles glittering.
Dr. William Elisha Peters, with whom Walter studied Latin,
was a small, mild man, plain in his dress but vastly proud of his
dainty feet, which he never disfigured, even in the worst weather,
with overshoes. No one laughed at his little vanity. He was a man
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federate army, it was said, he had refused the order of his superior
officer to burn Chambersburg with the retort, “I am not in the war
to burn the homes of helpless women and children” -a piece of in-
subordination which General Lee later approved.
There were other celebrated characters, too, at the Uni-
versity whom Walter frequently saw. William Holmes McGuffey, from
whose readers he and countless other children had learned reading
and morality, both similarly adjusted to their years, taught Moral
Philosophy. A small, beardless, bright-eyed man, he was pointed out
to Walter as he trotted along the arcade, carrying a cane and dressed
with old-fashioned conservatism in a long, black, full-skirted coat,
a high collar and stock and a tall silk hat.
Another figure having a distinction all his own was Mr.
Wertenbaker, almost the last man left at the University who had known
the great founder personally. Small and infirm, with a wrinkled
face topped by thin gray hair, he was looked on with general affec-
tion by the boys. He handled the University's printing, made up the
annual catalogue, kept the library open at specified hours every day,
filled in and signed diplomas, and played chess tirelessly in his
spare time in the back room of Dr. Michie's drugstore. More than
anything else he loved to recall the early days of the University,
when Mr. Jefferson was Rector, Mr. Madison and Mr. Monroe were on
the Board of Visitors, and Mr. Poe was a student.
The only other relic of Mr. Jefferson's day then remaining
was Henry Martin, the ancient and respected Negro who had been
brought from Monticello in the year of his master's death. A tall,
stalwardt old man, with thick black hair, almost straight, a long,
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for classes, kept the fires going in the Rotunda and classrooms
and took care of the buildings. Perhaps his most impressive at-
tribute was his ability to call every student by name, not only
during his years of residence at the University, but long after.
No time was wasted at the University. Classes began early
in the morning, the school year was nine months long, and no va-
cations broke it. The faculty thought long holidays were demoral-
izing; even Christmas was observed with but a single day's free-
dom. Any interruption to the business of educating young men to
take responsible places in society was less than ever to be per-
mitted when the South, prostrated under the extreme measures of
the Reconstruction, needed intelligent and well trained men to
re-establish it.
Walter quickly felt at home attending lectures or work-
ing in the library in the Rotunda, walking to class through the
arcades formed by the classical porticoes of the pavillions, or
strolling with one of his brothers down the avenues of trees on
the Lawn. It was a congenial and stimulating atmosphere for the
boy whose youthful face was already beginning to assume the ex-
pression of intentness that later characterized the doctor.
At home life was much happier than it had been at any
time since Ma's death. Pa had married again, Mrs. Mary Byrd
Kyle of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and although no one could replace
Ma, the boys soon became fond of their step-mother. Laura
had married J. W. Blincoe and gone to Ashland, and they had
missed having a woman in the family. When a baby half-sister,
Annie, was born, they all felt that their shattered family was,
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Walter was charmed by Annie. She seemed to like him, too, or
at least to think he was funny, and laughed and clucked at him as
she clung to his extended finger with the surprisingly tenacity of
very small babies.
“Do you remember when Walter was born, Jim?” Tom asked at
supper one evening. “What a terrible little pest you and I thought
he was!”
“Do I! He couldn't do a thing for himself except yell.”
“We'd just about reconciled ourselves to Chris, and then there
was this new baby. But we finally got kind of used to him, too,”
Tom added, grinning at his youngest brother.
“Walter, as I remember him, was much squallier than Annie,” Pa
joined in the teasing, “and the house was smaller, too. I think
babies have improved a lot in the last sixteen years.”
“Well, Pa,” Walter answered good-humoredly, “I hope I've im-
proved in the last sixteen years, too, although I know I still
can't compete with the young lady.”
“I don't see how any of you could improve any more,” Mrs.
Reed confessed, smiling around happily at them. “You'd be too good
to be true.”
* * *
At the University Walter was working very hard. He had a
plan in the back of his head. It might take persuasion to put it
across; certainly it would take hard work, and he would need the
highest marks he could get. He intended to ask for his bachelor's
degree at the end of his first year because he realized that it
was too hard for Pa to keep three boys in the University at once.
The University sometimes certified students whose records waswere
55.
He still found time, however, to stop occasionally for a
chat with Mr. Wertenbaker when he climbed to the library by the
narrow, steep stairs which, built into the wall and hidden from
sight, were the only kind Mr. Jefferson could tolerate.
Sometimes the old gentleman would show him a cherished book, its
fly leaf endorsed in the founder's fine, legible hand, or read him
a page from the new life of Jefferson by Hershey, the English his-
torian, just published by Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Mr. Jefferson's
devoted grandson. Once he showed him a framed letter from Mr. Jeffer-
son to young Mr. Kean*, appointing him student assistant in the li-
brary in the first year of the University's existence.
“He was a fine young gentleman,” the old librarian reminisced.
“His son was a student here, too. He married a Randolph, daughter
of Mr. Jefferson's grandson, and now he has a fine little boy, must
be six or seven years old by this time. He'll come here too, like
his pa and his grandpa.” He was off now on a complicated genealog-
ical discourse to which Walter, smiling, only half listened. He did
not foresee that this little boy, in whose existence he was now
barely interested, was in thirty years be his colleague and dear
friend.
Once in a while, as long as the ice held, Walter would go
skating with Chris or Tom or some of the other students on the
University ice pond, or on Cochran's pond beyond Charlottesville.
As spring came on the boys took long rambles in the hills around
the city, and once had a picnic at Monticello.
The beautiful home of Thomas Jefferson, the site of which
he had selected in his youth and which he had spent some thirty
* Pronounced Kane
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were dust covered and mouldering, with cracked walls and fallen
ceilings. Windows and shutters, skillfully designed by their arch-
itect to give the impression of a one story rather than a two story
house, were broken and unhinged. The slates of the porch were over-
grown with moss, and visitors had disfigured with their names and
their sentiments the front door and the columns of the portico.
The overseer, so old that he was nearer dead than alive, always wel-
comed students and let them roam freely. After all, what more harm
could they do than his own goats and chickens, innocent creatures
who wandered at liberty through all the rooms?
Even in its decay, the building impressed Walter with its
simple grandeur and dignity. The hens scattered ahead of the boys
as they came into the spacious entrance hall, covered with the
second parquet floor ever seen in the country -the first had been
in the palace of the colonial governors at Williamsburg, and Mr.
Jefferson, during his residence there, had admired it. Set above
the front door, the ingenious two-faced clock of his own design,
which had once told for the benefit of the absent-minded the day of
the week as well as the hour, looked blind and broken with its in-
ner face on the desolate elegance of the big hall, while its outer
one gazed blankly over the weedy lawn and the wooded hill. A skinny
goat stared back at them, curiosity in its mild eyes, from the room
in which the great man had worked on the plans for the University,
then scampered out of the way. In an upper room, reached by the
narrow, typically Jeffersonian stairs, they found the coach in which
the Marquis de Lafayette had ridden on one of his visits to the
University, stored there for a reason long since forgotten by someone
equally lost to memory.
57.
The ruin of the beautiful house, which had been its arch-
itect's beloved home for fifty years, distressed Walter. Its
desolation seemed to reproach the scanty honor done to the memory
of a great man in letting the place he loved most on earth fall
into decay. But Mr. Jefferson, Walter reflected, had left behind
him, in the Declaration, in the University, in all his other varied
achievements, more lasting memorials. Let his home, let every
physical reminder of him crumble; he would still be remembered be-
cause he did work worth doing, and did it well. That was better
than a monument.
* * *
It was the last week of the term. Walter had waited for
a quarter of an hour in the hall, then came out on the steps of
the Rotunda and stood looking down the Lawn. A slender boy of med-
ium height and erect carriage, he had a determined, almost stubborn,
mouth, and his blue eyes were clear and pleasant. Straight brown
hair was brushed neatly across his forehead, which he patted with
a clean white handkerchief. It was warm now, mid-June, but not
warm enough to account for the prickle between his shoulder blades,
or the dampness of his palms. He ran his finger around his collar,
which felt too tight, then hoped that he hadn't disarranged the
cravat his step-mother had carefully knotted for him.
“I want you to look your very best, Walter, when you go
before the faculty,” she had said. “A neat appearance always helps.
Pa's so proud of you. I do hope your application will be success-
ful. Such a shame you haven't a beard,” she added, touching his
smooth cheek.
“A long, wooly beard at sixteen, ma'am?” he teased her.
“I'd be a freak.”
58.
“Not a long one -just enough to shave, so you'd look older,”
she explained. They had both laughed.
Walter felt very little like laughing now, as he leaned
against the column and waited to be summoned before the faculty for
their decision. He had made his request to be certified for a
bachelor's degree without completing the academic course, adnd he
was to receive his answer today. Although such exceptions were
occasionally made, he feared that his youth would prevent it
in his case. If they refused him -well, then he had another pro-
position to make to them.
Behind him he heard a door open, and turned. Dr. Holmes was
peering up and down the hall.
“Ah, Reed, there you are. Will you come in now?”
Walter followed him into the lecture room. Ten or a dozen
professors were standing around talking to each other. He
recognized, besides those under whom he studied, Dr. Socrates Mau-
pin, chairmasn of the faculty and professor of chemistry and phar-
macy; Dr. James C. Cabell, one of a family famous in Virginia his-
tory; and Dr. John Staige Davis, the professor of anatormy. Dr.
James Harrison, teacher of legal medicine and obstetrics, was
raptly following a play by lay account of one of Lee's victories
given by Colonel Venable, who had been a staff officer of the general's.
“Come in, Mr. Reed,” Dr. Maupin greeted him. “Gentlemen,
shall we continue our business?”
They all resumed their seats, and in the brief silence that
followed Walter could hear his heart thump.
Dr. Maupin, clearing his throat, looked around him and then
at Walter.
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“Mr. Reed,” he said, “I am very sorry to disappoint you.
It is, however, the decision of this faculty that we cannot waive
the regulations to certify you for a degree, under the circumstances.”
“I see, sir,” Walter answered slowly, fighting back his
disappointment. “My work has not been up to the required standard?”
“On the contrary, my boy. Your record is excellent, excel-
lent. Your age is the obstacle. A graduate of sixteen is almost
unheard of, and as a matter of long range policy we do not care to
set such a Precedent, however worthy your case may be. We made,
you will recall, an exception to let you into the University. It
would really be too much to have to make another to let you out.”
Walter could not help smiling, Dr. Maupin had put it so
neatly.
“Very well, sir. I must bow to your judgment,” he agreed.
“But may I make another request?” The chairman assented. “Will
you give me a medical degree next year, if I pass the examination?”
Dr. Cabell, whose chin had been sunk up to the fringe of
his side swhiskers in his stiff collar, straightened and looked
sharply at the slim, beardless young man. The medical school, one
of the best in the country, would give a degree to any student,
regardless of the length of his attendance who could pass the ri-
gorous examination. It was rare for anyone to do it in less than t
two years; some took more. If the boy wanted to get his degree the
hard way, let him try it, Dr. Cabell thought, and shrugged. If he
hadn't the brain or the stamina, and it would take plenty of both,
he wouldn't last long.
Walter was waiting for an answer. For a moment there was
none. The gentlemen were glancing doubtfully at each other, with
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fident boy.
To clinch matters, he added, with a deferential little how
toward the anatomy teacher,
“Where Dr. Davis has blazed the trail, perhaps it will
not be impossible for others to follow.”
Dr. Davis, who had received his own medical degree from the
University when he was seventeen, smiled broadly at the adroit and
flattering invocation of precedent. Consulting the other doc-
tors with a glance, he nodded to Walter. Walter drew his first
deep breath that afternoon.
“Thank you, sir,” he said warmly. “Dr. Maupin, you have
witnessed these gentlemen's consent. Will you see that I get my
medical degree if I meet the required standard?”
“You shall have it, if you pass the examinations,” Dr.
Maupin promised him.
“Then, gentlemen,” Walter turned to the faculty, “I shall
hold you to your word.” He bowed to them and left the room.
Alone in the hall, he leaned against the wall, his knees
suddenly limp. Pulling his handkerchief out, he patted his fore-
head and wiped his damp palms.
“Thank heaven,” he thought fervently, “my voice didn't break.”
Another year, and what a year it would be, what a mountain
of work in it! But at the end of it, a profession to practice, and
beyond, the world and the future! Elated, he set off as fast as
he could walk to tell Pa and the family.
Back in the lecture room, Dr. Harrison was shaking his head.
“I'm doubtful about it,” he said. “It's a dreadful grind
for one year. Few have tried it, and fewer have come through it.”
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“I think he may make it,” Dr. Gildersleeve observed. “He's
an excellent student, quick and sound. Look at his record.”
“I scarcely anticipate that he will win his degree in a
year,” someone else remarked, “and I am even more doubtful of the
wisdom of giving it to him if he does. A goyboy of that age lacks
balance, experience.”
“There I can't agree with you, sir,” Dr. Davis came to the
defense. “He appears to be a very competent young man. He
behaved like a reasonable adult, respectful, no show of disappoint-
ment; and his reminder that he had precedent on his side was most
tactfully put. And,” he added with a smile, “he kept his wits about
him -no loose ends. He left us no way out. He exacted our word,
and we will have to give him the degree if he passes. It was a
very smooth performance for a youngster. I have an idea that we may
make a fine doctor of that young fellow,”
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| CHAPTER V Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |