Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  Jackson clearly had a beloved close friend in Angelique Piquenias, a Breton from Quimper, whom, the story goes, he “discovered” on one of his trips to his beloved France. She traveled with him back to the United States as early as 1920 and worked as his close and formidable personal secretary until the end of his career. “My aunts have learned to love you and pray for you in gratitude for what you have done for me,” she writes on one of sixteen separate postcards sent to Jackson on a trip back home to Brittany in 1935. Fellow laryngologist Gabriel Tucker, also onetime president of the American Laryngological Association, admired Jackson so much that he named one of his sons after him. Even today, according to Chevalier Jackson’s great-grandson Frank Bugbee Jr., admirers of Jackson—including people who as children were saved by him—seek out Frank to share their admiration for his ancestor, like the anesthesiologist from Texas whom Jackson treated as a boy and who called Frank to say that he keeps a shrine to Chevalier Jackson in his living room.

  Novels could be written from the sundry untold details of a lifetime of relationships left ajar that startle, refuse to square, or deserve more mention. Who was the unnamed bachelor responsible for paying young Jackson’s passage to Europe in order that he might study with Morell Mackenzie? The “bachelor,” who suffered from a chronic throat ailment, funded this key moment in Jackson’s career in exchange for the promise that Jackson would treat his throat for the rest of his life. What were the circumstances of the suicide of the Pittsburgh laryngologist who helped Jackson establish his early practice there? Dr. William H. Daly, another in the line of presidents of the American Laryngological Association, had been despondent since the death of his wife several years prior and was “suffering from melancholia” when he killed himself, according to the 1901 New York Medical Journal. How did Jackson weather the loss of this important colleague, whose aid and generosity Jackson found as “invaluable” in the early, lean years of his entry into the profession (LCJ, 87)? What could explain the remoteness that Chevalier L. Jackson seemed to exhibit toward his father even as they shared a profession and worked nearly side by side until his untimely death just a few years after Jackson’s? If Jackson’s son was absent—C.L. was traveling in Brazil when his father died, a situation that Jackson anticipated in his own instructions about his funeral arrangements—who was the girl that Jackson painted in 1922 named Yvonne (see figure 40), described on the back of a photograph of the painting as “portrait of my daughter when 12 years old.” Descendents of Jackson to whom I’ve spoken do not know who she is, but the painting is clearly Jackson’s and the handwriting unmistakably his, yet we know he had no daughter. Perhaps she was a metaphorical daughter: she was someone whom he loved enough to paint.

  Chevalier Jackson was not friendless: that mystery is solved. Thomas Rushmore French. Chevalier Quixote Jackson. Two men with middle names monumental and seemingly “made up.” “[A]nd now that my pen is running on paper for you”: if Thomas French’s heart did not bleed for Chevalier Jackson, at least his pen ran for him. In what might have been the last letter French would write to him—French’s closing words seem so final: “With best wishes for a gladsome year and life, Cordially yours, my friend Jackson, As always, TFrench” (with the T and F written as one)—French mentions a paperweight he is working on for Jackson. It’s not clear by his language if this is a commissioned task or a gift from a friend long in the making:

  A heavy demand upon my time has forced me to delay the making over of the inscription on your paper-weight. I am, however, sending it now with this. It goes by express. The red in the lettering got scared when the fixative was dropped upon it, and ran. I was about to make another when it occurred to me that as it was a relief to the flat white and black, a little dressy I thought, you might prefer it. If you don’t like it, I’ll do it over any time.

  Once again, Thomas French’s ink runs for Jackson; Thomas French, like a gentle kinsman, incites Chevalier Jackson to be more venturesome; to admit his love of “dressiness” in lieu of a reputation for self-denial.

  Closing a folder feels like ending a chapter, and there’s something sad about returning the letters to their position of a needle inside the haystack that is an archive. Perhaps my finding French will lead to a fresh display—has his unabashed expression of affection found its time? I can see these letters featured now inside a glassed case or cabinet of curiosity for the story that they tell of perfect correspondences: of doctors who are also artists; or of unremarked Americans who had a knack for painting and design. But wait: I can’t quite put the letters back and tucked away because a heedless scrawl draws my eye. Someone else has scribbled something at the bottom of one of Thomas French’s letters to Chevalier Jackson in faint pencil. A sentence at the bottom of an otherwise pristine letter reads: “Grace and in every Line, charming color and [a word that might be “mystery”] in every tone.” Who was the man or woman who wrote that line? Possibly a friend, of mine.

  Philadelphia was his workplace, but when he traversed the distance back to Old Sunrise Mills each day, Chevalier Jackson entered into a deeply quiet, rural space, ascending climbs and steeps with views of promontories, past totemlike power lines. Come June, the roadways of Montgomery County are lush, and the highway en route is pebbly and jagged, braced on either side by those brown-black rock climbs that could pass for the Pennsylvania Rockies. Clumps of low-lying trees and bushes contract space on the back roads that open just as dramatically into fields. The barn and mill and bridge, the walls and archways, the house on the hillside overlooking the wide-bottomed pond rely on rough-hewn stone and carefully planed dark wood for their construction, and one expects the damp hush of a monastery, birdsong rustling the somnolent shade, a haven that was no doubt the closest Chevalier Jackson could get to the idea of a country house in France.

  “This was a very private place,” Arlene Maloney reiterates about Old Sunrise Mills, and we’re reminded of the eccentric touches that Jackson impressed upon it that made it his, like the inclusion of a stove on his small boat to cook the fish he caught; the stand of automobile batteries that he lined up inside the mill and charged with running millstones for electricity ; or his habit of buying old barns that extended outward from the property, taking down the top part of these barns, and using the material to make new houses.

  I’m in the final, final archive when I find the article, a tiny news clipping really, about the size of three postage stamps laid end to end, floating inside a folder bulging with miscellany in the name of “biographical material on Chevalier Jackson and family.” The archive is one of the last repositories I had to visit, the Chevalier Jackson Postcard Collection in the Conwellana-Templana Collection at Temple University.

  Foul Play Ruled Out in Case of Mystery Bones

  The Evening Bulletin, May 17, 1974

  Two Montgomery County workmen were startled yesterday while inspecting the county’s pre-Revolutionary War Sunrise grist mill on Neiffer road in Upper Frederick Township, Pa.

  In the Mill’s dark and dusty third floor, they came across an old cardboard box filled with human bones. They called state police who called Dr. John Hoffa, Montgomery County coroner.

  The bones, wrapped in a June 18, 1926, edition of The Public Ledger, included a skull, jaw, pelvis, arm, and fingers.

  Dr. Hoffa ruled out foul play and called the bones “a beautiful work of dissection, done by a professional.”

  The box of bones probably was left there by Dr. Chevalier Jackson, a physician who owned the mill before it was acquired by the county some years ago, Dr. Hoffa said.

  Chevalier Jackson worked in Philadelphia but he lived and worked at Old Sunrise Mills. Did he even read the Public Ledger? After all, he had an aversion to newspapers and their men. One doesn’t picture him reading the paper even though he often appeared in it as one of the city’s stars. Instead, he uses the paper to wrap an assortment of human bones that he stows in an attic on his property. He doesn’t bury the bones beneath a floorboard like a crazed character from Po
e; nor need we imagine him throwing back his head with the delight of a mad scientist as he wraps and stows his human specimens, laughing a throaty laugh into the surrounding silence. It’s not as though he was hiding something when he wrapped and stored the bones, and yet one imagines he would not have been happy with their coming to light in the way they did, via a sensational-seeming story run in a newspaper many decades after he deposited them there.

  Foul play versus beautiful handiwork versus stabs, jabs, and cuts administered “professionally” rather than with homicidal intent of malice: the assumptions are beguiling. If the dismemberment is a hatchet job, something sinister transpired; if, however, the disassemblage of the human skeleton shows signs of clean cuts, there is no reason to presume criminality and therefore no mystery to be explored, investigated, or solved. “Foul Play Ruled Out”—well, it depends on how you define foul play and if you don’t wish to investigate the criminal element that attended the anatomy class for centuries before legislation was introduced, i.e., body snatching, grave robbing, and the use of human cadavers without consent. Ruling out “foul play”—the word the coroner opposed it to was “beautiful”—presumes that all murderers are bunglers and that all doctors work methodically, though of course some doctors are butchers and some murderers are master-minds. What’s more sinister? A methodical dissection or one carried out in a fit of irrational, irascible rage? We might need to bring Poe back in to answer that; we might need to consider how the most truly perfect crimes are those that have science as their alibi. But is it possible that the article was trying to say that the bones showed no signs of violence done against a living body but only some act performed upon a dead one?

  “Mystery bones”: methodology does not render the bones any less “mysterious” even if the newspaper article would like to dismiss any query attaching to its wonderfully evocative phrase. Attics are mysterious, as are archives, and bones recovered in either place more mysterious still. I expect bones to be placed in a resting ground marked with a memorial to the person to whom they once belonged, not wrapped in newspaper and placed in an attic alongside the Christmas ornaments and grandfather’s broken violin. An attic is the place where we put things that we have no room for anymore but that we need to keep, the things that are part of a house’s inhabitants’ collective unconscious.

  What act or set of acts do these bones hark back to in the life of Chevalier Jackson? To whom did they belong? Do the particular parts hold significance? How were the bones disposed of following their discovery in the 1970s? What were they doing in Chevalier Jackson’s attic wrapped in newspaper? Cadavers were shared by students in anatomy classes in the nineteenth century, and it’s likely that these bones date back to Jackson’s classes at Jefferson—that a cadaver was assigned to a group of physicians-in-training, and parts of it distributed among them. Integrity is hardly paramount, as I learn from osteologist and current curator of the Mütter Museum, Anna Dhody, who explains that there is a definite possibility that the bones did not all come from the same individual but were collected over a number of years from multiple dissections. The skull and pelvis were used by ethnologists as indicators of gender and of race; they were considered the parts of the human skeleton from which the most information could be gleaned about a person’s “identity.” Possibly this collection constituted Jackson’s teaching specimens and there is nothing untoward about the fact of their existence.

  “Oh those bones, oh those bones, oh those skeleton bones. Oh those bones, oh those bones, oh those skeleton bones. Oh those bones, oh those bones, oh those skeleton bones. Oh mercy how they scare!” The famous spiritual “Dem Dry Bones,” with music composed by James Weldon Johnson, is used to teach young children about anatomy, as it moves on in its second jaunty stanza to connect all the parts—the leg bone connected to the knee bone, the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, etc.—but the fright implicit in the song might serve as a reminder that the people most often anatomized in the history of medicine were the disenfranchised: suicides, executed felons, paupers, and, in the United States, African Americans. To unlock the mystery of the bones held in Chevalier Jackson’s attic is to acknowledge the fact that these bones were probably those of one or more persons of color. John Harley Warner explains in Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880-1930, that not only were most of the bodies used for dissection in Jefferson Medical College in the nineteenth century procured from the African American burial ground, Lebanon Cemetery, but racism and murderous intent ran high when the secret practices of the anatomy class were exposed:

  When the demonstrator of anatomy at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia was indicted in 1882 on charges of conspiring with body snatchers to steal cadavers from Lebanon Cemetery, student solidarity seemed only to redouble. Jefferson students heralded the resumption of classes by breaking into a parody chorus of the abolitionist anthem “John Brown’s Body,” calling with racist epithets for black subjects to be brought in for anatomical demonstration, and demanding that the reporter who had broken the story be lynched. “We might have some fun, the Philadelphia Press quoted one student. “We might make a few fresh stiffs, too.”

  In his discussion of the phenomenon of a burgeoning tradition of dissecting-room photographs, particularly those in which medical students pose with their cadavers, Warner notes a shared history with “commemorative” photographs of lynchings; in fact, “some professional photographers made part of their living taking both lynching and dissection photographic portraits.”

  Does dissection provide indispensable knowledge of the human body that cannot be acquired otherwise, or is its main purpose to socialize doctors as a breed apart and stage a rite of passage that secures a doctor’s entry into the profession? Numerous historians of medicine are currently willing to consider how these questions are implicated in each other, and Dissection brings into broad daylight the terms and conditions of a profoundly powerful medical taboo.

  “Dem bones, Dem Dry Bones” returns us to the Old Testament’s valley of death, whose bones Ezekiel’s faith in God is meant to re-inspire with life: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “O Sovereign Lord, you alone know” (Ezekiel 37:1-3, New International Version). The song, the spiritual, is not merely an anatomy lesson but an attempt to reassemble the disarticulated bones of slavery’s history, which includes the history of racist medical practice. Bones do speak; they report the history of a body and of a life lived, not merely the virtuosity of the medical student who severed and studied them as a means to secure his professional identity. Jackson’s attic contained a skull that once harbored a brain and a personality, a physiognomy, a nod; a hand that held or wrote; a pelvis that may have conceived; a jawbone that moved to speak, to chew, to grind, to clench, to open (willingly or no), to swallow. And who knows what particular aspects of the people’s lives to whom the bones once belonged were visible on the bones, as in the case of an eighteenth-century Connecticut slave named Fortune who was dissected by his owner, a man with the unbelievable name of Dr. Preserved Porter.

  Pamela Espeland’s annotations to poet Marilyn Nelson’s Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem explain that Porter “rendered” Fortune’s bones, and inscribed them with their anatomical names with the aim of passing the skeleton down to his sons (also doctors) and grandchildren as a hands-on learning tool. A team of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians has recently traced the skeleton, whose identity was mistaken, forgotten, and altered over time (at one point, the skeleton was called Larry), back to Fortune and determined that his bones spoke of a life of continual labor and forms of injury that include a once-broken back.

  The bones that were found in Chevalier Jackson’s attic are, as far as I know, nowher
e to be found. Did the workmen keep one each as a souvenir of their discovery, or did the coroner dispose of the bones, or inter or burn them, or . . . ? It’s anybody’s guess. What redoubles their mystery is that Chevalier Jackson saved them though not every student of medicine does. Writing to his father in 1886, Jackson distinguished himself from his peers as someone who was more interested in knowledge than they were. As a student, Jackson carefully saved human pathological specimens, microscopical preparations, and bones:

  The bones are sawn at each side of the joint so as to avoid carrying unnecessary bones. The majority of students don’t seem to care whether they get through with any practical knowledge or not but they never interfere with anybody that does want to learn. It looks as if they wanted to get a smattering of knowledge to make a display and hoodwink the people by a semblance of knowledge. They are the dudes.

  If you wished not to be classified as a “dude”—a term newly coined in the late nineteenth century to describe a dandy, a foppish man, a man affecting an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech, and deportment, in effect, the kind of man Chevalier Jackson no doubt was—if you truly wished to gain knowledge of the human body and not merely appear to have done so, you must keep dem bones, you must render specimens, or so Jackson was convinced:

  Dear Father,

  ... I have had to make a pretty large expenditure. It was however for the best. The professor of anatomy said by all means to save the ligaments on the joints in dissection of apart and preserve them in alcohol. He said that was the only way any person would ever know them. I went to him afterward and asked him about it. He said he never could induce students to save them and consequently they never learned them and that they were of the utmost importance as relating to anatomy of dislocation. He said to economize in other directions and buy the bones if necessary. I thought the matter over and concluded to take his advice.