American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Hosack had grown up walking past druggists’ and apothecaries’ shops, the main precursors of modern drugstores. The druggists in New York catered mainly to doctors and ship captains and tended to specialize in imported medicines. Traders in South America, Africa, India, China, and elsewhere collected or bought medicinal plants and minerals and sold them to importers in Europe and the United States. At John Beekman’s shop on Queen Street, for example, Hosack could step into a strange world of glass vials, ointment pots, and wooden boxes containing white crystals, greasy salves, gnarled roots, and crusty dried flowers. Beekman sold Epsom salts to purge the bowels, aloe from Barbados for dressing wounds, and Peruvian bark for fevers. Peruvian bark came in the form of a powder that was often dissolved in wine or liquor to mask the bitter taste. Although physicians had been arguing among themselves since the seventeenth century about how it worked and for which kinds of fevers, it had repeatedly proven its worth in hospitals and private practices, above all against malaria.*

  When he walked into an apothecary shop Hosack could see some of the same remedies as at the druggists’. Apothecaries, however, catered not only to doctors and ship captains but also to the many other New Yorkers who kept medicines on hand at home. Here there was even more bustle as the head apothecary and his apprentices pounded, ground, boiled, and decanted their raw materials into pills, powders, salves, infusions, and other finished medicines. Customers could ask for a particular medicine, or they could buy a portable medicine chest filled with bottles of common remedies. Sometimes the farmers who brought their produce to the city stopped in before crossing the river back to the isolation of the Brooklyn countryside.

  Most of the medicines Hosack saw came from plants and minerals, but some came from animals. Castor oil, prized for its antispasmodic properties, was derived from beavers’ anal glands, which were harvested whole and smoke-dried. (Today’s castor oil comes from a plant called castor bean, or Ricinus communis.) Spermaceti, a white substance harvested from the head of the sperm whale, was often used to make candles, but it was also a key ingredient of skin salves, including cold cream—a term already in use during Hosack’s childhood. The shops also sold sal ammoniac volatilis, a smelling salt that came in little cakes and was made from animal bones or manure. With its horrible urine-like odor it could be waved under the nose or applied to the skin to revive a patient who was delirious or fainting.

  Of all the medicines—animal, vegetable, or mineral—that Hosack saw in the New York shops, the most potent was mercury, usually administered in the form of calomel pills (a chloride of mercury). Although mercury is poisonous, it was popular then among doctors for its powerful purgative and saliva-inducing effects and was prized for treating fevers. Fever, in its many confusing varieties, was the most frightening sign that a human body was in peril. Some fevers seemed to strike just one person at a time, while others swept through whole districts in the same season each year. Yellow fever had killed hundreds of New Yorkers in repeated outbreaks in the eighteenth century, and no one knew when it might return or how it was transmitted. Smallpox also periodically besieged the city. During the Revolutionary War, a nationwide smallpox epidemic had killed more than four times as many Americans as had the British forces. Its victims ran a high fever and grew painful, pus-filled pockets under the skin that erupted and reeked like a rotting animal carcass. Those who survived bore the scars of their ordeal for life.

  Some New Yorkers were beginning to embrace the practice of inoculation against smallpox. Inoculation, like many other medical practices in eighteenth-century America, had been imported in part from Europe, where professors and physicians—inspired by the Enlightenment’s spirit of inquiry and recent improvements to the microscope—were conducting increasingly systematic experiments on the dead and the living alike. New York’s doctors, some of whom had studied in Europe, weighed each new medical theory against their patients’ actual symptoms and responses to treatments. They conducted risky surgeries at the New-York Hospital and visited the ailing poor at the almshouse. They wrote careful case notes about racing pulses, fizzy blood, and black vomit. They worked under a constant cloud of public suspicion that they prescribed their pills and bleedings for financial rather than medical reasons, and they faced competition from the dozens of druggists, apothecaries, and barbers who practiced medicine on the side. An essayist in 1786 captured the skeptical mood, writing that doctors “have good harvests and good times, when epidemical diseases and the small-pox prevail. Barbers wait impatiently for the agreeable spring, when people get themselves cupped and blooded, to prevent sicknesses.”

  Hosack was undeterred by the swirling confusion and criticism. He knew, however, that even if he read every medical treatise in the city he would not gain the clinical skills he craved—yet Columbia College offered no anatomy classes. He longed to study actual human bodies instead of written descriptions and pictures, so he apprenticed himself during his junior year to Richard Bayley, a former military surgeon. Bayley was in private practice with his father-in-law, John Charlton. Together they ministered to some of New York’s most powerful families: Astors, DePeysters, Schuylers, Livingstons, and their social peers. Bayley also ran an anatomy laboratory at the New-York Hospital where he gave clinical demonstrations to aspiring young doctors. In this room smelling of dried blood and rotting flesh, Hosack discovered that he adored dissection—not because he relished the macabre scene but because he was finally seeing the miraculous world hidden beneath the human skin. The more he learned, the more “ardently attached” he felt to medicine.

  Bayley had trained in London under John and William Hunter, two brothers who were pioneers in anatomy and surgery. The Hunters had taught that the only way to save the living was to study the dead. At the New-York Hospital, Hosack now watched in fascination as Bayley lectured with the aid of actual body parts. Though the humoral framework would not lose its hold for many decades, dissection was helping doctors to deepen their knowledge of the circulatory and nervous systems and to see how disease affected human tissue and organs. American medicine in the late eighteenth century was in the early days of a struggle, still underway today, between efforts to target specific diseases through the analysis of empirical evidence and efforts to improve overall well-being. Bayley’s autopsies offered a hands-on way to gather empirical evidence, but Hosack also saw that Bayley faced a serious obstacle. Although the practice of using cadavers for medical research had gained some acceptance in Britain, it was still barely tolerated in the United States.

  New York’s medical students were responsible for supplying their teachers with bodies, and they felt safest plundering the fresh graves of criminals and enslaved people. The African Burial Ground was only a block or so from the hospital; after this cemetery was unearthed during the construction of a government building in 1991, one of the skeletons was found holding the sawed-off top of his skull in his arms.† When these devalued bodies were hard to come by, the students haunted the graveyards where wealthier New Yorkers were buried. Early in 1788, rumors of outrageous acts of grave robbing swirled through the city. In late February city officials offered $100 for information about the pillaging of a fresh grave at Trinity Church. Unsurprisingly, Hosack left no record about whether he participated in these excursions, but he was growing ever more committed to the scientific principles that moved Bayley to lower his knife toward a waiting corpse.

  IT WAS A THRILLING TIME to be young in New York. As Hosack traced the circuit between his home and his classes, he might at any moment cross paths with the most famous men in the country, men who were tussling over the fate of the national experiment. New York was the state capital (the move to Albany was a decade away), and since 1785 it had also been the seat of the Continental Congress. All around the city, pro-Constitution Federalists were arguing bitterly with the Antifederalists headed by Governor George Clinton about whether New York should ratify the Constitution at the convention slated to be held in Poughkeepsie in the coming summer. While Hosack studie
d with Bayley at the hospital, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison were drafting their series of newspaper essays advocating for ratification, which would come to be known as the Federalist Papers.

  In April 1788, Bayley’s laboratory was suddenly attacked. Some people later said it happened because one of the students had waved a severed arm out of the window at a group of children playing in the hospital yard, telling a boy the arm belonged to his recently deceased mother. This crude remark apparently reached the children’s parents, because a group of armed men stormed into the hospital and up the stairs to Bayley’s laboratory. They were horrified at what they found there—“different parts of bodies, eyes, &c. coffins filled with excrements” and “a long table, bloody knives, and a horrid nauseous stench.” As word of the carnage spread, people spilled into the streets. Hosack was not at the hospital at the time of the attack, but he set off running in a desperate bid to save some of the anatomical preparations housed at Columbia. On Park Place, a few blocks from College Hall, a man struck him on the forehead with a rock, knocking him to the ground. He feared he was about to be killed but a family friend who saw the attack hustled him to safety. Mayor James Duane and other officials ushered a group of doctors and medical students into the jail and locked them inside for their own protection, even as people beat on the doors with rocks and threatened to burn down the jail.

  Meanwhile, John Jay was at home with his wife when General Matthew Clarkson appeared, asking to borrow a sword. Clarkson said he was on his way to the jail to make sure the insurgents would not “tear in pieces the Doctors who are confined there,” as Sarah Jay reported in a letter to her mother. Jay armed Clarkson and himself and they went out into the rain. At the jail, Jay was bashed on the head with a rock and knocked unconscious. Dr. Charlton brought him home in a carriage with “two large holes in his forehead”—but to Sarah’s relief no fracture of the skull. The next day her husband’s eyes were swollen and discolored, and he soon came down with an illness she attributed to his exposure that day. He would not be drafting his pro-Constitution essays for some time to come. At sunset on the second day of the riot, city officials ordered the firing of cannon, alerting the militia to assemble. Dozens of guardsmen—one estimate put their number at a hundred and fifty—gathered at City Hall and marched in formation toward the jail, where they clashed with the rioters. At least three people were killed before an uneasy quiet settled over New York.

  Hosack’s resolve to become a doctor was unshaken by the violence, but he was among the medical students and professors who left town until tempers had calmed. He moved to Princeton to complete his undergraduate work at the College of New Jersey—the future Princeton University. However, he found it hard to stay away from New York for long. In the fall of 1788, with the Constitution now secure, his hometown was named the capital of the new nation. On April 30, 1789, George Washington placed his hand on a Bible on the balcony of the former City Hall, which was now known as Federal Hall. The United States had its first president.

  Hosack next pursued advanced studies in anatomy, surgery, chemistry, and midwifery, working with three men who were to loom large in his adult life. Samuel Bard would come to love Hosack like a son, Nicholas Romayne to persecute him, and Wright Post to bear witness to his most bitter disappointment. For now, though, Hosack saw them simply as three of the most accomplished doctors in New York—Bard especially. On June 17, 1789, at the presidential mansion on Cherry Street, Bard dug a lancet into George Washington’s unanesthetized thigh and cut out an abscess. The president remained calm and mute.

  THE CITY HOSACK LOVED was now the proud capital of a new republic, but in some ways the place was as European as ever. He could still hear Dutch spoken here and there. He could walk along streets with names such as Roosevelt, Cortlandt, and the Bowery (from the old Dutch word for farm, bouwerij). When he glanced toward the harbor, he could catch sight of a jagged, step-gabled Dutch façade upending the straight British rooflines. At the northern end of the island, beyond a village long ago named for a distant city called Haarlem, members of the stalwart old Dyckman family were about to commence another century of farming.‡ In the smoky bars of lower Manhattan, men drew on their cigars, a Dutch habit that one Frenchman who visited New York in 1788 found disgusting.

  Hosack could see even more of Britain than of Holland around him. New Yorkers had fought hard to throw off the British yoke, but the wealthiest among them still preened each morning before gilt-edged mirrors imported from London and donned suits sewn for them by the English tailor on Water Street. Rich women rolled imported silk stockings up their calves and stepped into slippers finished with gold buckles. Delicate little hands reached for porcelain teacups across damask tablecloths, and they grazed the keys of harpsichords that had been hoisted from damp cargo holds down at the docks. The wealthy young ladies of the city cultivated such expensive tastes that potential suitors had begun to drag their feet a little. “Luxury forms already, in this town, a class of men very dangerous in society—I mean bachelors,” observed the visiting Frenchman Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville. At one New York dinner party, Brissot noted the gaudy costumes of the female guests, two of whom “had their bosoms very naked.” He was “scandalized at this indecency among republicans.”

  Republicans? Perhaps not. At least not in the eyes of those fellow citizens who couldn’t afford to cultivate upper-crust British tastes or who simply found such habits undemocratic. To be sure, many New Yorkers rich and poor, opulent and austere, welcomed the day the Constitution became the law of the land. In late July 1788, a month after couriers had ridden into the city to report that New Hampshire had tipped the balance toward ratification, thousands of New Yorkers had poured into the streets to celebrate. But united as they stood in their distaste for foreign tyranny, they had also seen during the ratification process that deep fissures divided them. Many of the city’s wealthier citizens counted themselves Federalists—a loose political grouping whose members were attracted to aspects of the British model of government, especially its strong central authority. And many of these Federalists wished the United States to maintain cordial ties with Britain, a sentiment particularly strong in New York City, where more than a few merchants and bankers owed their well-appointed townhouses and fine clothing to the lucrative seaport trade with Britain and its West Indian markets.

  The Federalists’ standard-bearer was Alexander Hamilton, a human whirlwind who argued with eloquence that only a powerful central government would be capable of unifying the states and preserving the fragile young nation. Hamilton had acquired star status among New York City’s Federalists for his tireless defense of the Constitution and his decisive role in securing its ratification by the state of New York. A war hero who had turned in a daring performance at the decisive Battle of Yorktown, Hamilton still carried himself with the panache of an officer as he strode the streets of postwar Manhattan. Hamilton’s young wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, a dark-eyed beauty from a prominent Albany family, was lively but modest. Hamilton thought that Eliza was “unmercifully handsome” and full of “good nature, affability, and vivacity.” Eliza, in turn, was devoted to the affectionate Alexander, whom she had met and married in 1780, when he was still a colonel in the Revolutionary Army. Now, as the 1780s drew to a close, she and Hamilton occupied the very center of New York high society. During the heady days following ratification, some people had suggested the whole city simply be rechristened in her husband’s honor: Hamiltoniana.

  This apotheosis would have unleashed howls of fury from the growing coalition of politicians known as Antifederalists, who had fiercely opposed ratification and regarded Hamilton as a traitor to the ideals of the Revolution. In their view, the new Constitution endowed the federal government with sweeping powers inimical to both states’ and individuals’ rights. When New York’s diehard Antifederalist governor, George Clinton, had tried to mobilize his supporters statewide in an effort to block ratification, he had managed to enrage a good swath of New York C
ity, where it was feared Congress would pack up and leave town should the state delegates junk the Constitution. At the state Constitutional Convention in Poughkeepsie in the summer of 1788, Governor Clinton bristled publicly at Hamilton, while around the same time in the city one New Yorker wrote to a friend, “I do not believe the life of the Governor & his party would be safe in this place.”

  Hamilton and his supporters eventually won this battle, but for all the shared exuberance at Washington’s inauguration and the anointing of New York as the nation’s first capital, more trouble lay ahead. James Madison, one of the staunchest defenders of the Constitution, which he had so decisively shaped, had begun to worry along with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson about the prospect of an eternal unholy alliance between politicians and speculators. “The Coffee House,” Madison wrote Jefferson, “is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers.” Madison and Jefferson soon found a way to rescue the nation’s political leaders from the seething den of financial iniquity on the Hudson. On June 20, 1790, Jefferson staged a dinner party at his house on Maiden Lane at which he helped broker a course-changing deal between Madison and Hamilton. According to Jefferson’s account of the evening, the two men came to an agreement that in a matter of months the government would leave New York for Philadelphia, to meet there while the permanent capital city was built closer to the South, on the Potomac. (In the years to come, New York would remain the financial capital of the United States, thereby creating at least the appearance of distance between financial speculation and the nation’s political business.) For his part, Hamilton—now the first secretary of the treasury—would notch up a victory in his campaign to see the federal government assume the Revolutionary War debt of the states. And so it was that in the autumn of 1790 Hamilton and Jefferson, along with the rest of the government, moved to Philadelphia, where they continued their quarrels over finance, centralized authority, and foreign policy.