January 2011

One hundred years of American medicine…

A special section of American Heritage considers the trials, glories, and failures of the healing art as it has been, and is, practiced in this country. To begin with, we ask, What was it like being sick a hundred years ago? Charles Rosenberg describes what was likely to happen when doctors were few, far apart, and not very knowledgeable. … Then we take up the story today: Oliver Allen interviews Dr. David E. Rogers, former dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who tells us what is wrong and right with medicine now and the very sophisticated technology it depends upon … Dr. William Bennett describes the birth and evolution of one of our greatest hospitals, Massachusetts General … and Bernard Weisberger tells the ghastly story of a yellow fever epidemic that broke out along the Mississippi in 1878.

The purpose of war

In his article “The Holland Surfaces,” the author fails to mention that John Philip Holland tested his submarine in the Passaic River in 1878. One of his early submarine models, the Fenian Ram , is on display in Paterson, New Jersey. During the time when the Beatles were so popular, the good citizens of Paterson awoke one morning to find that the Fenian Ram had been painted yellow after the Beatles’ song, “The Yellow Submarine.”

NO ONE IN 1855 could have foreseen that a modest little volume of 258 pages, bound in cardboard and the size of a postcard, would mushroom into the immense tome of 1600 pages that serves as a cornerstone of most libraries in the English-speaking world. Familiar Quotations was the creation of John Bartlett, for whom—to paraphrase Melville’s remark about the whaleship being Ishmael’s Yale and Harvard—the University Book Store in Cambridge was college.

All history is modern history.

—Wallace Stevens

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

—Oscar Wilde

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

—Thomas Carlyle

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.

—Abraham Lincoln

What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.

—Harry S. Truman

THE ARTICLE ON the rise of the American suburb by John R. Stilgoe (February/March 1984) was illustrated with seed catalogs, paintings, trade cards, magazine covers—but nowhere with one of the most appealing of suburbs: Lionelville.

Founded in of 1900, the Lionel Company built increasingly detailed and impressive toy trains, and in time developed a whole tinplate world to go with them: signal towers and generating stations, depots and houses.

The company understood that the suburbs contained not only a clientele that could afford their trains but also homes with ample basements in which to build layouts. So it is not surprising that the buildings Lionel offered tended to mimic the suburban world that the railroads had summoned from quiet farmlands outside the cities. In lavish catalogs, the company displayed villas and bungalows and Lionel Terrace, a village garnished with lampposts, shrubbery, and a triumphant American flag as big as the houses themselves.

The “Time Machine” section for February/March contained an error. Maj. Samuel Shaw could not have been carrying a letter from President Washington, since George Washington did not take the oath of office as President until April 30, 1789, long after the Empress of China had returned.

The caption to the photograph of the Holland on pages 42-43 of the April/May issue is slightly in error in stating that the two monitors in the background were first used in the 1870s. That is quite correct for the ship in the far background. She’s the Terror , laid down in about 1874 and completed in 1893. The nearer ship, however, was brand new.

She’s recognizable at a glance as one of the Arkansas class of monitors authorized in a fit of congressional panic on May 4, 1898. Masthead detail identifies her as the Florida , later renamed Tallahassee , built by Lewis Nixon of Elizabethport, New Jersey, and commissioned on June 18, 1903.

The ship in the photograph is obviously in commission—ensign flying, fire in the boilers, and crew’s laundry strung up to dry. Which means that the earliest possible date for the photograph is the summer of 1903.

May I point out a small error in the April/May article “Avery”? The firm of William A. Boring and Edward C. Tilton is mentioned as designers of the U.S. Immigration Station on Ellis Island. The error is in Mr. Tilton’s middle initial, which was not C but L , for Lippincott.

Mr. Tilton was my father. I studied architecture under Dean Boring at Columbia, and it is possible my father’s name was assumed to be Edward Charles, since mine is on record there as Charles Edward.

It is noteworthy that the buildings at ElHs Island won a gold medal for the firm at the Paris Exposition of 1900.

In the February/March 1981 “Postscripts,” you published an article concerning the standard-issue postcard used in World War I, which as you said, was a “masterpiece of tight-lipped communication in which the soldier had only to cross out what he didn’t want to say.”

I have one of these postcards, which my father, Albert Gall, sent to my mother while he was fighting overseas. I admire his creative cleverness in turning it into a love letter. You’ll notice that his postcard is stamped by the censor, who must have gotten a chuckle out of it.