University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII

By 1881 Walter Reed was a captain and had a mustache. He
had been in the United States Army for six years. He did not
know when his original idea of leaving it had faded from his mind,
but it was gone.

He had begun his Army career with a dutiful regard for the
good name of the Medical Corps. That sentiment had expanded
quietly into complete devotion to the service which, struggling
against disadvantages, rose constantly above its limitations.

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There were never enough medical officers to go around,
so that civilian doctors had to be hired under contract to fill
even the peace time needs. Overworked hospital stewards and
bored privates continued to care for the sick. Post hospitals
still were unequipped with modern facilities. Hidebound offi-
cers sneered at bacteriology and antisepsis. The prospective
retirement of Surgeon General Barnes had brought about an un-
dignified scramble among the higher ranking men who hoped to
succeed him.

There were, however, certain heartening advances. The
use of antisepsis in surgical operations by post surgeons was no
longer infrequent, although Lister was still being ridiculed in
London. Some of the more alert officers had become interested
in bacteriology and modern hygiene. In George Miller Sternberg
the Medical Corps had an officer who was a bacteriologist of real
distinction, one of the earliest and foremost in the country.
There might be much to deplore in the Corps, but there were also
many things to be proud of, and these sprang from the initiative
and enterprise of men like Reed, who, by no means blind to its
faults, were proud of its progress and eager for its improvement.

On his return from Arizona, Reed had been appointed a
captain in June, 1880. After three months' leave of absence,
which he spent in Virginia, he had been stationed that fall with
the infantry at Fort Ontario, at Oswego, New York. The next March
and April found him on duty at Forth McHenry, in the vicinity of
Baltimore -and, incidentally, of Johns Hopkins University.

This university, operating on a principle new in Amer-
ican education, had been established in 1876. It was not,
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like most American colleges, a school for the general education
of undergraduates, but a center of learning, like the European
universities, where advanced students trained for work in their
chosen fields. Thomas Huxley, the famous English biologist and
exponent of evolution, which was then widely regarded as a theory
that could not be reconciled with religion, had spoken on biolog-
ical research at the inaugural exercises, which had been held
without the customary prayers or hymns. The incident had provoked
a storm. “It was bad enough to have asked Huxley. It were bet-
ter to have asked God to be there. It would have been absurd
to ask them both,” wrote an indignant minister. The incident had
also served notice that the new university was backing modern
science.

During those two months early in 1881 Reed was briefly
introduced, at first hand, to modern medicine. Dr. Newell Mar-
tin, formerly an assistant of Huxley's, was the professor of
physiology, and had established the first biological laboratory
in the United States. Special students, not enrolled in courses,
were sometimes given the privilege of attending lectures at the
university, and it appears that Reed took advantage of this op-
portunity to hear Martin lecture. There were not yet, in 1881,
courses in pathology and bacteriology -they were to wait four
years for the coming of Dr. William Henry Welch, whose student
and friend Reed was to become -but interest in both subjects
was keen already keen. Conservative medical journals might still
make game of Pasteur for seeing germs everywhere, but modern
medicine had enthusiastic converts at the new university. It
quickly made another of the young Army doctor who had spent mostbeen for
of the last five years on the frontier, almost entirely out of
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touch with scientific developments.

The time at Fort McHenry passed with exasperating quickness
for the eager medical officer who was barely given time to glimpse
the new scientific world opening before the explorations of re-
search men. At the end of two months Reed was ordered to duty
at the coast artillery post, Washington Barracks, at Washington,
D. C. He must have felt like a starving man jerked unceremonious-
ly away from an irresistibly appetizing meal.

The Reeds, however, found Washington an agreeable change
from the lonely years on the frontier. They could go to the
theatre, make short trips into Virginia and North Carolina to see
their families or, on more limited excursions, walk about the city
without sinking, as they once would have done, in mud to the ankle.
“Electric speaking telephones,” although still rarities, had been
in use for several years. The first electric light had just ap-
peared in the city. Work was continuing on the huge and fussy
pile of the State, War and Navy Building. And The Washington Mon-
ument was deliberately laboring upward. The city everywhere
proudly flaunted signs of its progress, progress which was excit-
ing to the officer and his wife so recently arrived from the west.
Their most vivid memory of Washington, however, had nothing to do
with its growth and the changing scene. It centered on July 2nd,
1881.

* * *

It was hot that morning, hot and clear. Reed, glanc-
ing through the newspaper at breakfast, scanned the big headlines
proclaiming Yale's crew had defeated Harvard's and noticed with
more interest the statement in smaller type that the
President's wife, Mrs. Garfield, was rapidly improving in health
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and strength. Mrs. Reed remarked that weather like this made one
appreciate Arizona, and Lawrence upset his glass of milk across
the table.

At his mother's reproachful exclamation his lower lip
turned out ominously, and his blue eyes floated in tears.

“There, there, old man,” Reed consoled him, hastily right-
ing the glass and sopping up the flood with his napkin, “this is
one thing we never cry over. Conme on, smile now for Father, like
a good fellow. Smile?” Lawrence smiled, a little uncertainly,
then laughed at the funny face his father made for him.

“Really, Dr. Reed, you'll spoil him to death,” Mrs. Reed
said smilingly and without conviction.

“He's like his mother. He won't spoil,” Reed said and wonent
back to his paper.

“President Garfield will probably not take action on the ex-
pected retirement of Surgeon General Barnes and Paymaster General
Brown until Congress meets,” he read aloud. “Barnes is a fine
old gentleman,” he commented, “but it would be the best thing in
the world for the Corps to have a man with modern training at
its head.”

“Who do you think will be the next Surgeon General?” Mrs.
Reed wanted to know.

“Oh, probably one of the old timers. Crane, maybe. He's
been Barnes' office assistant for years.”

“You'd like to see Dr. Sternberg get it, wouldn't you?”

“Indeed I would! Professionally he's the most eminent
man in the Corps. But it's out of the question; too many out-
rank him. Think what a clanking of brass hats there would be!
Did I tell you that Sternberg has set up a biological laboratory
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at his own expense at Fort Mason?”

Mrs. Reed sighed. She suspected that her husband, after
his brief Johns Hopkins experience, would like to do something
of the sort himself. But it was one of the things -there were a
great many -that you couldn't do on a captain's pay.

Reed folded the paper and took a final swallow of coffee.

“Well,” he remarked, getting up, “I can't sit here and gos-
sip with my charming wife and interesting son all morning. I work
for a living, you know.” A warm, quick smile, smile that made his
blue eyes sparkle, and he was gone.

Mrs. Reed did not see him again until evening. By that time
neither the newspapers or anyone else cared about the crew races
or the Surgeon General. The shattering news of the attempt on
the President's life had crowded all other matters from everyone's
mind. He had been shot and gravely wounded in the Baltimore and
Potomac railroad station as he was about to depart for New York.
His assailiant had immediately been caught, and troops had been or-
dered from the barracks to keep order.

Reed, when he returned, was tired and depressed. He had
guarded the man, he said, at Police Headquarters before he was trans-
ferred to the greater d safety of the District Jail.

“And the President?” Mrs. Reed questioned.

“It's a bad wound, so I was told,” Reed answered. “He may
well die of it.”

“Who could have done such a senseless, wicked thing!”

“A crack-pot. His name's Charles Guiteau. He's a little
man with thin brown hair and sunken cheeks and gray eyes. When we
got to Police Headquarters he was boasting that he had done it
on inspiration from God for the good of the Republican party. He'sd
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been trying to get some political appointment, and had been
snubbed. He said the blood of French Revolutionaries ran in his
veins, and made a number of other irresponsible remarks. He's
simply unbalanced. He's afraid, “Reed smiled faintly, “that Nast”
-the popular cartoonist who had launched the Tweed Ring exposé -
won't make a good likeness of him.”

“To think that the President of the United States may die be-
cause a crank imagined a grievance against him!”

“It's frightful,” Reed agreed wearily. He raised himself
stiffly out of his chair and went to the door. “I'll have to look
in at the hospital for a few minutes. I haven't been there since
early morning, and there are a couple of men I want to see afgain.
Don't wait up for me.”

The President lingered manfully. General Sherman, granting
an interview in his garden, tried to allay public anxiety. He
expected the President to recover; his face didn't have “a cer-
tain death-like look.” Everyone hoped the Civil War hero knew
what he was talking about. Certainly he had seen enough dead men.
Ungrammatical with emotion, he had added, “The dreadful act was
committed by a fool -he don't even rise to the dignity of a
crazy man.”

For more than two months Washington lived in a crescendo
of muted anxiety. Then the President was moved to the seaside.
Two weeks later he was dead. Chester A. Arthur took the oath of
office as President of the United States, and life in the capital
clicked back to normal.

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