Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  Hereafter he describes “skirmishing” about town in search of undiluted alcohol and a 2.5 gallon jug: “I obeyed the professor’s injunction not to add water as it would macerate the specimens to such an extent that when I most wanted them they would be worthless and would tear apart like paper.” Jackson had quite a supply of bones, judging from these letters, the bones found in the attic, and his description in his autobiography of having had to sell “a fine, dissected, dried and anatomical specimen [he] had made during the winter months in the dissecting room” to a wealthy medical student. “The nine dollars would just barely pay my train fare home,” he wrote (LCJ, 62).

  Yet his “mystery bones” distinguish him again in this: they bring out the kernel around which his life’s energies rallied, the terms of his own defining crisis, that complex preoccupation with a need to save oneself or the desire to save others, that confusion whereby keeping and saving come to be thought of as one and the same. At the center of Chevalier Jackson’s life story—whether we locate that in the autobiography or in the acts that constituted his life—is the sense that he needed to reckon with a feeling that he must save himself, both from other people, and by himself. Of course all saving is relational; no one truly saves, liberates, protects, rescues, or redeems himself without the help of others. Jackson knew this better than anyone; he knew that other people relied on him to save their lives every day. But the sign of his conviction that no one could save him manifests in his collecting—the compulsion to take pleasure in saving Things, to rescue and then to keep Things as a repetition of self-saving. Jackson’s mystery bones are another form of self-preservation, another genre of keep-sake, a sign of his fervent desire to protect himself, to perform a secular, fetishized redemption.

  “I dread leaving Alice to get through life’s affairs. Otherwise, the cardiac failure that is getting worse steadily does not worry me.” Chevalier Jackson did not keep a personal diary, so it’s especially poignant to come upon a calendar book in the National Library of Medicine from 1952 in which he monitors a feeling of failing health inside the square of each new day: “heartrate up”; “slight vertigo after going up stairs”; “edema”; “dyspnea”; “suffocation attacks at night”; “fatigue noticeable but can render it less conspicuous by activity.” Also: “Tuesday, November 4th, went to Poll to vote. This is my 87th birthday anniversary”; “Christmas Day. Father died suddenly on Christmas Day 1889, 63 years ago.” Alice predeceased Jackson by one year.

  Around 1952, several years before his death, Jackson took care of details that he did not trust to others. He knew, nearly a decade in advance of his actual demise, that his son would be too busy to attend to his father’s death notice. “My son might be away on one of a series of meeting trips and confusion of many accumulated things on his return might cause delay,” he noted in materials that he left for his secretary, which included the letter she was to send to the American Medical Association upon his death. It began, “Dr. Chevalier Jackson passed away yesterday,” gave his CV, and advised reading his autobiography for further details.

  Was “Chevalier Jackson passed away today” too difficult a sentence to write of one’s own passing? Does “yesterday,” putting it in the past, confer a distance on it while imbuing that detail with an aura? Is this Chevalier Jackson’s self-hewn headline? It’s Jackson “taking care” of Things and then some; it’s Jackson speaking from beyond the grave.

  With great care, intent on saving, Chevalier Jackson wrapped each part of what remained of a human in a piece of newspaper—the June 18, 1926, edition of the Public Ledger, to be exact. The bones are a product of an anatomist’s work—that is what made them worth saving—and perhaps Jackson hoped to keep them that way, pure, unmarked, unspeaking. But the newspaper as casing enfolded the bones with stories and therefore with many more mysteries, unplumbed; it pinned them to a moment of time even if, archivally, the time is not their own.

  Wrapped around a jawbone: Miss Pauline Bell won the National Spelling Bee for spelling the word “cerise”; Babe Ruth failed to connect in four times at bat in a 6 to 2 setback against the Sox; and the “Human Fly” thrilled thousands in Camden: “For more than ten minutes last night a ‘human fly’ hung from the cornice of the Camden courthouse, endeavoring to swing himself over the ledge. He finally made it. Then he stood on his head on the cornice, climbed the dome and sat on the nob at the peak.”

  Cradling a hand: sesquicentennial celebrations continue with an episodic spectacle depicting ancient Rome, medieval Venice, Florence, and modern Italy; Celestino Madeiros has admitted to the murder “world famous radicals” Sacco and Vanzetti are accused of committing.

  Crimped at the corners of a skull: the newspaper’s Lost and Found, mostly lost:

  • small black suitcase

  • pin: diamond and pearly crescent

  • eyeglasses

  • handbag

  • package from “Night Comfort Garment”—reward

  • naturalization papers no. 49538 in the name of Aaron Miller, 818 N. 7th, reward if returned

  • dog, Pekingese, answers to name Chin Chow.

  Chevalier Jackson was caught up in the furtive occupation of preserving his handiwork; it was a rainy day, according to the Public Ledger‘s weather report, and this was a rainy-day project, so he probably did not pause to read the scantest outline of a tragic tale that must belong to realms of fable. One headline gives a general sense of the story—“Ends Life When Horse Dies”—while another, in a smaller font, yields more particular details: “Farmer Hangs Self with Rope Which Caused Animal’s Death.” In smaller lettering still, the tale is told:

  Kansas City

  Misaji Kawahara, a Japanese truck farmer living near this city, hanged himself today when he learned that his horse, to which he was much attached, was dead. The horse became excited during a thunderstorm last night and choked itself to death in an effort to break away from a tree to which it was tied. Using the rope from the halter, Kawahara hanged himself from the tree.

  Chevalier Jackson would have felt a deep affinity for Misaji Kawahara, whose love for and identification with an animal inspired so extreme an act. Or maybe not: maybe he’d blame the farmer for his carelessness. The farmer loved the horse too much to live without it; the horse’s death became an impasse beyond which the farmer found it impossible to live. The death of the horse by desperation and strangulation, the pathos of the horse’s suffering and struggle, the idea that it might have been the farmer’s fault for tying him there, the sense that this horse was all the farmer had—the condensed story invents its own details. With nothing but these bare and extreme details, Kawahara’s life gives way to a grand narrative whose pivot point is the fact of something dying by trying to get free. Less mysteriously, the life could gain some scaffolding. Such as: a Japanese farmer in 1926 travels from crop to crop without the chance to own. He barely gets to eat the food he cultivates. A Japanese farmer is a source of hatred in 1926, as witnessed by the 1922 court case that declared all Japanese people ineligible for citizenship and enacted more enduringly by the anti-Japanese immigration act of 1924 disbarring Japanese from emigrating to the United States for another twenty-eight years. Misaji Kawahara had no naturalization papers to lose. Who was that man? A “suicide.” An immigrant. A victim of a lynching? Where would they bury him? Where are his bones?

  Such bones as these are here, disarticulated, detached, inside a cardboard box inside a famous doctor’s attic; stowed high, high up, high as a human fly could stray, arcane as a French word for bright crimson, mysterious as buried treasure, waiting for some unassuming laborer to find them. To disturb them, create a ruckus, and cry out.

  The life and work of Chevalier Jackson is its own genre, a grand narrative made up of three distinguishing parts: it begins with something quotidian and banal—an object; it requires some form of handicraft and invention—the instrument; and it often entails a pilgrimage. The instrument, like a magic wand, may cure or calm the tale’s bewitching parts, b
ut it’s also bewitching on its own. The pilgrimage is the tale’s religious aspect.

  Arlene Maloney’s mother “never really told too many stories,” Arlene remarks, but there was one she liked to tell. Arlene, now nearing ninety, remembers hearing it in her own early childhood. Her Pennsylvania Dutch grandfather took her mother out of school in eighth grade and sent her to work for an Orthodox Jewish family in Allentown. This family “made her read” and sent her back to school, supplying her daily with a fresh batch of newspapers and magazines to hone her skills. One day at a picnic, a young cousin of hers was “chomping on an ear of corn” when he hiccoughed and aspirated a kernel into his lung. The boy became sicker and sicker until he developed pneumonia. “I know somebody who removes things”: the sentence falls like magic onto her aunt’s and uncle’s ears as Arlene’s mother tells them she read an article in the Allentown Morning Call about a Philadelphia bronchoscopist named Chevalier Jackson. The family entrusts the teenaged girl to make the pilgrimage with their son, who by now has developed an abscess. She’s the one who read about him, so she should be the one to meet him—maybe this is how they thought about it. She and her cousin took the hour-and-a-half trolley ride—“they still have that trolley, by the way”—from Allentown to Philadelphia, where “Jackson was to expect them.” Arriving in the lobby of the clinic, she says, “I’m here to see Chevalier Jackson.” The reply is obvious but unforgettable: “He’s waiting for you.” Arlene’s mother stays with her cousin during the day; in the evening, she sleeps in a boardinghouse across the street from the hospital. Jackson removes the kernel, and, within thirty-six hours, she and the boy are on their way back home. He’d recovered completely and was never thereafter affected by the accident. Looking back on the tale, Arlene sees it as having—why not indulge the pun?—a kernel of destiny since her nursing career takes her to Philadelphia, where she meets her bronchoscopist husband and even works as a circulating nurse in Jackson’s Temple University clinic.

  Before I make my journey to the Jackson homestead and Old Sunrise Mills, the assistant administrator of nearby Pennypacker Mills advises me: “The Sunrise Mill property is not open to the public and is quite hilly, so bring comfortable shoes.” I don’t generally wear high heels to archives, but I guess I could feel inspired to dress up for this particular trip, marked as it is by the power of the dwelling place.

  Prior to my arriving, the administrator tells me that they have some “items” relative to Jackson stored off-site—things donated by his granddaughter Joan, window shades, some wicker furniture, a coat. “We have his coat,” the administrator reiterates in a phone conversation in which he haltingly describes, in slowly unfolding bits and pieces, the types of Jacksoniana I might see. Unless it’s his lab coat, one would be hard-pressed to know why the coat was saved. The coat. A coat. Your coat, my coat. What will happen to any of our coats after we die? “Mainly I’m struck by the idea of my making a pilgrimage to a coat,” I write a friend, “because in some weird way that’s what I’m doing.”

  My guide is generous, and his tour of the grounds’ tree-lined roads backlit by forest is resplendent. The mill’s perfectly square windows are calming, maybe for the way they offset the mill’s heavy and irregular rocks, maybe for the way they sing of measure alongside the rushing waters of the millpond’s falls. There are confirmations (“Ah, I know this”) and surprises (“I could have never imagined that!”), while all the time we are accompanied by a yellow butterfly striped in black that sometimes flies behind us and sometimes leads. We stroll as we roam, until the afternoon promises to swallow us up, when the administrator reminds me of the storeroom they are in the process of creating. It’s in another location, at one of the Montgomery County parks, and there are boxes there, and other Things that had only recently been found in an attic or in the barn. “The box of letters is about eight inches thick,” the administrator had earlier written me. “I hope to have them cleaned and all the rusted paperclips removed by Thursday. Many are patient reports, some relate to his speeches and are his notes and some deal with speaking engagements in Madrid and Paris.”

  The storage room, itself an attic, only awaits cabinets to store this stuff, most of which strikes me as so much detritus. Scattered across an expanse of floor and neatly stacked in piles are cords of magazines that Chevalier Jackson had subscribed to, a box of dried-up paint supplies, assorted broken-off bits of pottery, and a many-layers-deep supply of surplus reproductions of the images Jackson sent each year as Christmas cards. Donning the white gloves that always accompany archival boxes, I leaf and rifle through what I can’t believe continues to exist as a paper trail. I’ve been through umpteen boxes and countless case studies in the major repositories of Jackson’s life and work. How could more papers at this late date have been found in the attic or barn? How could there be anything left over, left behind, undug, and only recently dusted off? I force myself to race against the clock and read even though I know I don’t have room in the metaphorical box that is my book for any new discoveries, and I don’t expect to make any. Still, I let myself settle down and pause before one case history. It’s lengthy and it’s moving and it’s harsh—it describes a boy who did not survive—and though I’m not sure why, I decide I want a copy for my files, so I ask the curator to Xerox it for me before I go.

  Back home, I take in slowly the difficult details of this case, involving a ten-year-old boy and a silver half-dollar, but I’m mostly preoccupied with the frustration of groping in the dark. One of the archives I’ve relied on for illustrations has closed because of budget problems, so I’ve gone back to the drawing board by ordering a range of Jackson’s textbooks through my library to see if I could possibly find some vaguely proximate images in the public domain. I’m blindly browsing, not really reading, when I come upon a photograph of a boy. He’s perched at the end of a long gurney and pictured from the side. His hair is matted with sweat, his eyebrow arched, his face marked by the pain that sitting upright obviously causes him. A linen panel crosses his thighs and genitals, but otherwise his too-thin body is unclothed. He dangles there, as though his body is the subject of a lettering system that holds his abnormality in place: an A and arrow point toward his back, and a B labels his front (see figure 46). The only fat on the boy is to be found in the protuberance that the letters mean to mark. The protrusion is in fact so prominent that the boy seems as though he’s been devoured by a foreign body—that his own body has become its host, and there is hardly anything left of him except as casement for the thing. The book in which the image appears was a contribution to the Annals of Roentgenology: A Series of Monographic Atlases published in 1934, and Jackson’s caption reads:

  A large subcutaneous purulent accumulation (A) in a boy, aged ten years, an extension of pulmonary abscess due to a coin (half-dollar) overlooked in the esophagus (not bronchus) for six years. A similar purulent accumulation had been evacuated before admission and the fistula (B) was still discharging at the site of evacuation. The coin did not follow the pus. An epithelialized fistula had been established by the coin between the esophagus and the left bronchus.

  In layman’s terms, the boy was subject to a swallowed coin that, stuck in one of his body’s passageways, the foodway, now protruded into another, an airway, where a serious infection had subsequently taken hold. The A and B seemed so misplaced alongside the child’s live and emaciated body. Even an untrained eye could see the growth that protruded from his back and the hole in his front from which the wound was draining. Why did Chevalier Jackson feel the need additionally to point?

  In a sudden gasp of apprehension, I realize that I know this boy. I have been knowing him and not knowing why, but it’s him whose case study I’d stumbled upon in the unfinished storage room and felt compelled to save. This is the boy I had brought home from the attic, from the barn. Encountering these photos with the boy’s case history in hand is like finding someone’s soul, and for long moments I swear I feel him with me (does it matter it’s an attic study from whi
ch I write?). I feel him with me, but I don’t mean by this that I’d concocted something mystical in the convergence of photo with life story. It was more like fitting part to whole and, in the accidental rediscovery, being given the chance to remember the boy, to whom medicine might have done a great injustice, differently. To demystify him as a figure of amorphous pain and wasting, to fulfill a request that was obvious and pure: to close my story of Chevalier Jackson with his own.

  Yes, it’s clear. I’ve seen this boy before this and not seen him at all. I reopen Jackson’s Autobiography. He’s there. I open the textbook tome I’ve most relied on—Diseases of the Air and Food Passages of Foreign-Body Origin—and he’s in there too, always in the form of a photograph and its blithely instructional caption. In the autobiography, he is lying on his back, supine, and his arms, so thin, look too long for his small body. They’ve blotted out his eyes in the way that students in the dissecting room cover the face of their cadaver while they work so as not to be reminded of the status of the body as a person or a personality. Did they shield his eyes, already pained from squinting, from the flash of the photo, or instruct him (as so many medical procedures do) to hold his breath and stay stock still? The point of all of these photographs of this terribly suffering patient seems to be to demonstrate how hopelessly sick he is.

  But who was that boy, the living boy, and how can we regard and re-inspire him with the aid of the case history? All of the great names populate the pages of the case—Chevalier Jackson, L.H. Clerf, T.A. Shallow, and eminent radiologist Willis Manges—they were on it, while the boy himself is given three differently spelled last names. The son of Polish immigrants, the boy appears to have a last name that begins either with Ch or H and ends either with an a or an e. His first name is always Michael. He entered Jefferson Hospital on January 26, 1926, and died there on February 18, 1926. The diary account of his decline is dominated by references to a “fluctuating mass” and its drainage, and temporary relief for the boy as indicated by phrases and sentences such as “considerable improvement” and “patient’s condition seems to be definitely improved,” only to yield in the days that follow to “quite serious” and what was already anticipated—“Death”—as a result of an infection of the pleura and subsequent formation of pus termed empyema necessitas.