Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted (25 page)

“Yes, Caroline, so they are. I’ll take them off.” Looking rueful, but obviously teasing, he took them off, and with slippers in hand went on his way. Mrs. Halsted made an inaudible remark, but her body language and shaking head made it clear she considered him hopeless.

In late season, dwarfed by the tall plants, Halsted would bend the stems to him and study the flowers. He would cut fresh stems in the morning dew, carry great bundles to the houses, arrange the flowers, and deliver them to guests and family.

Toward the end of the 19th century, dahlias had become something of a fad for gardeners in both the United States and Europe. The plant, indigenous to Mexico, was known as Dahlia Juarezii. It grew wild, and parts of it were harvested and processed for food. After a single root survived an 1872 shipment to the Netherlands, it was cultivated and cross-bred. The resulting tall, strong stems and beautiful flowers, with a hardy nature and environmental adaptability, became instantly popular. Dahlia clubs soon became a feature on the garden circuit, and Dr. Halsted’s garden was widely visited and well respected. Dahlia experts shared their passion, and Halsted took great joy in sending prized new specimens to growers he knew would appreciate them.

Though Caroline, with Bradley and the staff, prepared and planted the beds, they did so according to Halsted’s instructions and used
the new dahlia varietals he had chosen the preceding winter. Upon arriving, he took charge of the project as if he had been present since inception. He made sure to fill in all weak spots in the show garden with plants from the larger cutting garden, and carried an old wicker “Nantucket” basket filled with wooden name plates to help visitors identify the numerous new specimens.

The growing season for dahlias ended with the first frost. At that time the stalks were cut close to the earth, and the tubers, which had multiplied beneath the surface, were pulled, cleaned of earth, dried, separated, and stored. Most would be given away to make room for the new varieties expected the following spring. Halsted would send gift packages to interested dahlia growers, give others to neighbors, and annually he left a sign at the post office announcing their availability to the community. The local infiltration was so successful that colorful dahlia gardens were everywhere. “One saw in driving within a radius almost reaching Toxaway Lake gorgeous dahlias growing in the little front yards of the poorest cabins.”

The mountain people of the area were indeed mostly poor, and poorly educated. Different in every way from the Halsteds, there was an uneasy interaction between them, but the locals clearly held the doctor in very high esteem. Caroline’s sister, Lucy Haskell, wrote, “Personally I think that he did not much like the mountaineer—his ignorance, superstition and religion were almost unintelligible to him and he did not enter into the racy shrewdness and humor that is often theirs … perhaps they did not show it to him, he was of another world, ‘outlander,’ a ‘furriner.’ But for the ill he showed a large sympathy and helpfulness.”

Having the doctor among them was useful, and increasingly the mountain folk sought his help and advice. On numerous occasions Halsted arranged for transport of seriously ill neighbors to Baltimore for care at Johns Hopkins at his own expense. Communication between them was usually by letter, and devoted letters of thanks
were not unusual. Long lists of symptoms were sent for his attention. These were carefully evaluated, and he helped whenever he could. But the mountain people were a trying breed. Later in life, Halsted arranged for an elderly local woman with a large cancer of the skin of the forehead and eyelid to be treated at Hopkins with the new radium therapy Kelly had instituted and championed. Halsted made the personal effort to see that she was afforded the much sought-after new modality. The woman was living on an undeserved veteran’s pension left by her army deserter husband, and later tried to have the pension, to which she wasn’t entitled, increased due to her disease. Halsted made clear his distaste for this behavior to friends and colleagues, but he was unfailingly polite in dealing with this woman and others in the community. Although often annoyed by requests for money or medical assistance, he never exhibited the famous sarcasm and biting comments that had established his reputation as a fearsome tyrant at the hospital.

Halsted provided neighbors with a level of help for their medical problems that would otherwise be far beyond their reach. He was called upon to administer to horses, dogs, and cattle, and became increasingly adept at veterinary medicine. Neither of the Halsteds believed in offering charity, and demanded something in kind for their assistance. Often this took the form of goods and services, usually labor and produce.

Halsted, like many physicians, was an amateur astronomer. Consulting with a lens maker in Madison, Wisconsin, he had a large telescope constructed and installed on a platform off the back porch of the lodge. Constantly troubled by difficulty sleeping, he would awaken on clear summer nights and pad off to the telescope platform in pajamas, robe, and carpet slippers to study the heavens until daylight. He acquired charts and maps of the stars and was soon conversant in the constellations and their relationships, which he enjoyed pointing out and identifying to others.

As one might expect, he dressed immaculately in his version of country fashion. Usually this meant a comfortable tweed suit, soft collared shirt, and necktie, sturdy walking shoes, cane, hat, cigarette holder, and Pall Mall cigarette. In warmer weather, shirtsleeves, bow tie, and straw hat might suffice. In a photograph thus outfitted he sits playfully atop the back of a slat-back chair, his country shoes on the wooden arms, trousers tucked into colorful, checkerboard high socks. On the rush seat of the chair are two dark, short-haired dachshunds, and looking up at his master, from the ground, a lovely spaniel. For a man so obstinately photophobic, he seems totally at his ease, perhaps happy, in the photograph. Boater on his head, pince-nez glasses, graying goatee and mustache and smiling face, Halsted looks anything but forbidding.

Caroline, on the other hand, remained consistent in her disinterest in her appearance. Her city clothing was plain, dark-colored, and often homemade. She favored sensible, brogue-type shoes, and her hair was usually tied back in a bun. Though not imposing physically, she was muscular, or at least large-boned, and she reinforced the impression of size and strength with mannish clothing. The country version was largely homemade as well, and decidedly downscale. She wore homespun skirts of shorter-than-ankle length; high, heavy boots; a manly shirt; and a broad-brimmed hat. The locals described Caroline as “salouchy,” which meant clean but untidy.

Dogs were a permanent presence in the Halsted household. Nip and Tuck, the favored pair of dachshunds in their lives, among others, were always in residence, usually along with a pair of lively hunting spaniels. The dogs rarely left Caroline’s side. Nip and Tuck shared the Halsteds’ bed, and one would rarely see her on a buckboard or carriage without a dog or two on her lap, often all four surrounding her. Away from home, Caroline carried Nip and Tuck about in a wicker basket. The dachshunds were lively substitutes for the children the Halsteds had declined to have, and both took great pleasure in their company.

The inevitable deaths of family pets are wrenching events. For the Halsteds, in later life, the loss of the dachshunds, in which they had invested so much love, was totally demoralizing. Halsted wrote his friend William MacCallum of his feelings upon the death of Nip:

We are very depressed today by the death of Nip. I have just made the autopsy. The cause of death was a valvular disease of the heart, a chronic affair that may have dated from his attack of distemper years ago. He has been ailing for weeks. Mrs. Halsted has nursed him night and day hardly leaving him for a moment. She is quite worn out. I think I wrote you that Silsy died a few weeks ago. So we are without a dog. I have the feeling that Mrs. Halsted will come to town earlier this autumn now that she has no dogs. She will miss their company sadly.

The expression of sadness was genuine, and as heartfelt and emotional as any recorded utterances of his. One must keep in mind that Halsted was a clinical scientist and surgeon, and had, by that time, spent 30 years performing experimental dog surgery followed by autopsy. The fact that he was detached enough to perform the autopsy himself is not unusual among surgeons, and speaks more to his scientific mind-set than to lack of emotion, though Halsted was surely more professionally detached than most.

LIFE AT HIGH HAMPTON
consumed time and money year round, and the Halsteds kept scrupulous records of farm expenses on slips of paper, and uncharacteristically not in the form of ledgers, or financial “books.” Though largely self-sustaining in the production of hay, potatoes, corn and cornmeal, rutabaga, turnips, poultry, pigs, and beef cattle, little was marketed, and no appreciable income was realized.

Transactions between Halsted and Douglas Bradley, caretaker/ manager of High Hampton, were most often handwritten notes on small
sheets of paper, rarely utilizing professional letterheads or engraved personal stationery. Occasionally, the notes or small balance sheets were typed by one of two secretaries Halsted employed at home. The nature of the transactions was simply a matter of listing monthly expenses, pay due regular employees and day laborers, money due the Halsteds for bags of milled grain taken, or money advanced to the staff.

The comfortable lodging provided for Bradley, his wife, and children was near the main house, with several windows, fireplaces for heating, and hot and cold running water. There was no mention of an indoor toilet facility. Bradley was paid $40 a month and housing. Most other farm labor was contracted on a daily basis at an average wage of a dollar and a half a day. There were often six or seven field laborers employed. The number decreased during the winter months, unless a specific project such as logging or construction was underway. Planting, growing, and harvesting required more help. A steady stream of communication was kept up from Baltimore to Cashiers during the winter months. Caroline was most intimately aware of the nuances and necessities of the farm, but for what may have been a matter of form and the need to establish authority, orders were often sent by William.

Occasionally, household servants were brought up from Baltimore, but more usually they were imported from Columbia, or elsewhere in the South. Caroline was constantly appalled by the housekeeping and culinary standards of the local people they had attempted to employ, and since she often said of herself, “I am no housekeeper,” the quest for acceptable staff was never-ending. At times it became a source of friction, with complaints from Caroline resulting in procrastination from William, who was reluctant to fire household employees. In all, he was often amused, and rarely upset by the situation.

When they were in residence, household staff included a housekeeper, a cook, a laundress, and a house man assigned to care for guests. The in-house staff was black, and frequently treated in the condescending, paternalistic manner prevalent in the 19th- and early-20th-century
South. Generalizations were made about race, and demeaning terms were casually used that are wholly unacceptable today.

“The weather is still cool here. Mrs. Halsted and I are doing the cooking,” Halsted wrote. This is a revelation in itself, since neither had any but the most rudimentary kitchen skills. “Our servants have not arrived and it is impossible to find a soul in the valley who can cook.”

And later, “Yes, our darkies have arrived at last. You can imagine what a relief it is to Mrs. Halsted and me. I became quite expert in setting the table, washing dishes, etc., and Mrs. Halsted is quite a good cook. I believe that I could now boil potatoes—am still a little unreliable on rice and corn bread.”

William Stewart Halsted was an aristocratic and urbane northerner. He was polite and proper to a fault and was not known to swear. In his letters, as in his speech, there was a distance and formality, and the obvious manners of a gentleman. Reading a reference to African-Americans as darkies, no matter how off-putting it seems today, must be seen within the mores of the time. As late as the 1930s, the term “darkies” was routinely used by whites and blacks alike, and was not seen as pejorative. The plaintive 1935 song “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” was a national recording sensation, with renditions by both Kate Smith and the great black baritone Paul Robeson. In the same era, in letters to President Franklin D. Roosevelt seeking protection from lynch mobs, Negroes explaining their plight frequently referred to themselves as “darkies;” hence we must not read too much into Halsted’s use of the term more than 100 years ago.

Caroline Hampton Halsted’s attitude toward blacks was neither virulent nor unexpected. Her South Carolina upbringing, and the loss of the good life formerly associated with slave holding, was probably offset by her uncle Wade Hampton’s surprisingly enlightened attitude toward emancipation. There is, however, significant evidence in her letters of a belief in the inferiority of blacks. An example of this can be found in a 1910 letter to Halsted, who was in Paris at the time. Caroline
rarely traveled with her husband, having found a European trip made early in their marriage not at all to her liking. William Halsted was devoted to traveling for business and for pleasure, and he spent a large part of most summers in European surgical capitals and at unknown destinations. He did not hesitate to leave, and she was content to be at High Hampton. In the letter, she says:

The two darkies are having double fits over my last scheme for ridding myself of rats and mice. After some trouble I managed to have got for me two black snakes which are now happily reposing in the attic. They cannot possibly get into the house so I see no reason for their terror. The man announces that the wife has heart disease and if she were to see a snake she might die. She is not afraid of them, but he is. So I have promised to have them removed. They cannot be caught of course but we shall try to catch two others and palm them off. The lower one goes in the race, the bigger fools I suppose they find. I hope you have some of my letters by this time. Not that I have written many, but enough to let you know that I am alive. I am glad that you are enjoying your French lessons. To me your disposal of your summers does seem absurd. Instead of going away from stuffy, dirty cities where you have been living all winter you just go and immure yourself in another buggy place. If you must study French why can you not take it somewhere besides a large city. Still I suppose it is the amusement you want and change, not particularly French. For I do not see what you have learned is of any use to you.