Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont Read online

  He dipped his pen and tried to resume writing. Ramsey Crooks was proposing to expand a company warehouse into the land the garrison used for a garden. The project threatened the plots of medicinal herbs and wheat Beaumont had planted. Beaumont drew a line beneath his notes about the garden controversy and wrote, “Tended to a young voyageur at the Company's store. Shot into his left lower chest. Accident. Wound engages both lung & stomach, likely mortal.” He looked at these words, and then he set his pen down.

  He gazed out the window at two men sawing a log. It was brutal, tiring work. The stack of raw timbers beside their saw pit would take at least a day.

  During the war he could have filled pages of his notebook with cases like this young fur trapper, and for several weeks he had. And then he stopped. The war was fine training for an apprentice-trained surgeon with aspirations, but it was a cruel university.

  After some battles, the wounded came without surcease, begging for relief. Some pled to have their arms, legs or even their heads cut off. Many of the chest and abdominal wounds, wounds like the fur trapper's wound, the doctors simply cleaned and packed as best they could to limit the egress of innards and left the men to die.

  The doctors worked with increasing haste as the numbers of wounded multiplied. The maimed, gashed and dying lay upon whatever surface was available. The agonies of men dying or wishing they could die and the murderous grating of saws working through long bones filled the air. After several hours, their brutal work built several fly-covered piles of amputated arms and legs, some of the legs still dressed in stockings or boots.

  He remembered one frigid evening in a ruined fort they occupied as a hospital, when the littlest of the stewards was clutching the amputated leg of a black man as he hesitated before the pile of white legs until Beaumont signaled with his chin to set it among the rest.

  Even the name of the war was changing. The Second War of Independence was now simply the War of 1812. It was as though the three long and bloody years had become one, and the war was for nothing. It was just a single year when America and Great Britain decided to fight and then to make their peace. History was not a nation's diary of the facts but the selective forgetting of those facts.

  Beaumont reread the lines he had written in his notebook, added the date and put away his pen.

  “Goddamn,” he muttered. In the war treating every man was impossible. But not here.

  He looked at the nail of his throbbing right index finger. He had picked a rent into that nail until he tore it to its sore and bleeding cuticle. He snipped the errant nail between his teeth and spat it upon the floor.

  In his walk back to the hospital, he had heard the murmurs, seen the men nodding, children wide-eyed and women whispering and pointing. The news of the plan to keep the young fur trapper on the cot in the supply room was spreading fast through the village, up the hill to the fort and throughout the camps along the lakefront. The more he reviewed that decision, the more he regretted his part. It was different when there were not one but one hundred men or more. When it was war and you were following orders. But then another thought struck him. What could Pearce and Crooks do if he were to carry the wounded man to the hospital?

  For several minutes, he watched the under man in the saw pit struggle to manage the force the over man applied to the handsaw, and then he stood up with such force that he had to grab his chair to keep it from toppling.

  “Elias,” he called. “Elias!”

  There was the quick shuffling of shoes across the gritty floor. The old man appeared at the door.

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “Gather up my surgical kit. We're going to the company store to fetch that lad.”

  Elias did not move. “I thought the plan was that he was to be stayin' at the store? That you'd tend to him there.”

  Beaumont nodded. “I said, gather up my surgical kit.”

  WHEN BEAUMONT AND ELIAS reached the store, they heard the sound of men's laughter from within. Ramsay Crooks and three other officials of the American Fur Company were gathered about a table sipping from blue tin cups. Crooks was recounting his story of outwitting the Teton Sioux along the James River. A sunbeam illuminated a whiskey bottle at the center of the table. A haze of cigar smoke swirled above their heads. They turned when Beaumont entered the store.

  Crooks blew out a stream of smoke.

  “We didn't call, did we?” He looked at the others. The men shook their heads. Crooks motioned with his smoking hand to the open supply room door. “As you left him, William. Teddy's tending to him. Fancies himself some manner of hospital steward now.”

  The men laughed.

  Beaumont went directly to the supply room. Theodore Mathews was wiping the man's face with a damp rag. He stepped away to give Beaumont room. The boy was awake, wide-eyed and breathing rapidly.

  “I'm sorry, Doctor. I was just trying to help.”

  “No worries, Theodore. I'll take care of him now.”

  Beaumont lifted the boy's thin wrist and began to measure his pulse. It was racing like a snared rabbit's. The boy tried to speak, but the words were garbled. His desiccated tongue was shrunken to a dark nub at the back of his mouth, and his lips were chapped and cracked and bleeding. Beaumont hushed him gently with his forefinger to his own lips. He propped up the boy's head to give him water to drink, but the boy coughed and writhed in pain.

  Crooks and the other men entered the room and watched Beaumont.

  “Teddy here tried to give him some water but didn't know what was proper. Is this it then, William?” Crooks asked.

  Beaumont gently set down the boy's head and then pressed the back of his hand upon the boy's forehead. Warm but not febrile. He inspected the tips of his fingers. Pink. He was not sinking.

  “We need to move him to the hospital,” he announced. “Now.”

  Crooks, his lips pursed, nodded to the other men, then said, “There were some voyageurs from the Blackfeather brigade here, what, just after you left. We could take him down to their camp along the beach. Be amongst his people. You could tend to him there, of course. More home-like, I'd say. I think it'd be best.”

  Beaumont did not take his eyes off the boy. “I said he goes to the hospital straightaway.”

  Crooks raised his thick red eyebrows. “You discussed this with Captain Pearce?”

  Beaumont was inspecting the frame of the cot, testing its resilience. He looked at Elias. “I think we can use this as a stretcher.”

  Elias nodded.

  “So then he's not dying as fast as the good doctor divined when he agreed to care for him here.”

  Beaumont did not turn to face Crooks. It was all he could do to contain his anger.

  “No, not yet, Ramsay.”

  THEY USED THE COT AS A STRETCHER. Theodore Mathews at the front, Beaumont and Elias at the rear, though the boy was light and needed just two men to carry him.

  The people they passed stopped their work. Some stepped out of their doorways or leaned out of windows, their arms crossed upon the sill. A woman gathered her three children close to her skirts. The dogs stared, their ears erect.

  At the hospital they eased him into a bed in the corner, away from the north wall that in a winter storm was no better protection than a cotton coat. Beaumont gestured to the company's cot.

  “You can take the cot back with you, Theodore. I'll have Elias return the blanket by the morrow.”

  Mathews shook his head quickly. “Keep the blanket. And the sheet. Keep it all.”

  “Thank you, Theodore. Don't you fret, you've done good work.”

  “Right then, Doctor. I best get back to the store.”

  The young clerk turned on his heel and ran out of the hospital. Beaumont rose and stepped across the squeaking floor to hang his coat upon a peg. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and turned to Farnham, who stood awaiting his orders.

  “I haven't seen a wound such as this since the war. I'll need water, some of it boiled, some of it cool, and lint bandages, and at least one b
ottle of muriatic acid. He'll need more laudanum too. And duck fat for his lips. The water and the bandages first please, and after you gather the rest of the items start to prepare a carbonated fermenting poultice.”

  Beaumont drew up a stool and a low table, set his surgeon's kit upon the table, unlaced it and rolled it out before him.

  “Quickly, Elias. Quickly if you please.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  The wounded fur trapper drew out his exhale into a long and low rhythmic moan except when he coughed. Then he would wince and cry, ball his hands up into fists and breathe rapidly.

  Beaumont considered the task before him. The righteousness that had compelled him began to fade. In its place came doubt.

  Without the operation, the lad would likely be dead by morning. The war had taught him that. He knew as well that this lad could very well die from the exertions of the surgery. To have carried the wounded fur trapper from the company store to his hospital against orders only to have him die would humiliate Beaumont. He could have managed the surgery in the storeroom. He'd operated in far more crude conditions. Crooks and Pearce would call him out as brash and intemperate. Think of the precedent, William. Think.

  Elias Farnham returned with the supplies. “Is something wrong, sir?”

  Beaumont looked up at his steward.

  “No, I've all that I need.”

  He reached down and brushed the matted black hair from the young man's eyes and forehead. “I'm going to take away these dressings and clean up this wound. Mr. Farnham here will help me. Mr. Farnham is my steward. My name is Dr. Beaumont.”

  The boy was lost in his pain.

  Though he was thinking of the agony he was soon to commit upon his patient, his manner of speech was a measured calm, a perfect equipoise between caring and indifference. It was a skill he had learned when he apprenticed under Dr. Chandler upon the residents in Champlain, Vermont. “Aequanimitas, William, aequanimitas, never let their sentiments and wild appetites get the better of you,” Chandler would recite as a patient moaned and shrieked and wailed. “So too with your own,” Chandler counseled his apprentice. “They obscure right reason.”

  He began to ease off the bloody dressing. It was a gruesome sight. Fractured bits of ribs, shreds of flannel with their edges burnt crisp and the pellets from the shot had worked their way loose. The sound of air bubbled through bloody mucus from the burnt margins of the lower lobe of lung. The skin around the wound was red and raw.

  To keep the lower lobe of his lung intact when the young man coughed, Beaumont packed that space with lint. Using blade and forceps he began to pick away the flannel and shot and cut away the burnt muscle and skin until blood signaled he had reached vital tissue. Farnham had to forcibly pin the young man down to keep him from thrashing at Beaumont. His screams were piteous.

  Beaumont said not a word. From time to time, he leaned away from the cot to allow Farnham to hold the young man as he panted in agony while Farnham murmured words of sympathy.

  Within an hour, the enameled basin next to Beaumont was filled with debris, burnt tissue and blood-soaked lint. The fur trapper's pulse remained fast, but it was strong.

  Beaumont wiped his eyes with his sleeve. He was exhausted.

  “How are you doing, lad?”

  His patient uttered a few unintelligible words.

  “Say that again if you can?”

  The trapper repeated the same words.

  Beaumont looked to Farnham. “French?”

  “I reckon so. I don't speak none of it but some bits, bonjour and merci.”

  The young man turned his dark eyes to Elias and spoke the same phrase again.

  Elias nodded. “I believe I got it, Doctor. He's saying ‘Alexis’ or something like that, but I can't make out the rest.”

  Beaumont said, “Alexis,” and the lad nodded and repeated that word and then another.

  Elias slapped his thigh. “Alexis Samata,” he cried. “He's saying his name, Dr. Beaumont. Alexis Samata. His name is Alexis Samata.”

  The fur trapper nodded slowly as he repeated the same words.

  “Alexis Samata, I'm Dr. Beaumont, and this is my steward, Mr. Elias Farnham.”

  Alexis took them in.

  “Beaumont,” he pronounced the word quietly. “Beaumont,” he repeated. He smiled weakly, and then he closed his tired eyes. He was short and skinny with impossibly long arms and thick hands. His chin and the sharp line of his jaw bore the smudges of a few days' beard. He couldn't be more than eighteen years old.

  “I think he just might make it, Doctor.”

  Beaumont looked up at his steward.

  The old man tried to smile. “You've done your very best.”

  “Thank you, Elias.”

  Beaumont rested upon his stool as he watched the boy's breathing even out into a steady, unlabored pace. His serial measures of Alexis's pulse showed a general relaxation of the high arterial action. He had survived the shooting, and now he had survived the debridement. The problem now was the summer heat. His experience from the war had taught him that within a day, two days at most, putrefaction and fever would set in.

  THREE

  WHEN WILLIAM BEAUMONT WAS A BOY, no more than five, an uncle rode in from somewhere out west on a roan horse outfitted with saddlebags that bore that man's initials hammered in gold. He carried a brace of flintlock pistols whose barrels were etched with mythical sea creatures, their smoky handles burls of high-polish walnut. On the pinky of his right hand, he wore a golden ring set with a green emerald the size of the nail of that same digit, and he was dressed in a soft coat that matched that stone. He sat before the fire steeped in drink, pipe smoke swirling around his head, and told his wide-eyed nephews of their ancestor William de Beaumont, who was named Earl of Warwick by William the Conqueror.

  “There would have been land to go with such a title. Land and indentured servants. But centuries later we descendants, you and me, lads, are scattered hither and yon, toiling fallow earth, searching for our fortune.”

  He pointed at each of the boys with the amber stem of his pipe. He licked his dry lips.

  By the morn, his father, rich in pride but poor in land and cash, called his brother a fop and a fool and ordered him never to cross his threshold. This brother's name was never again uttered, and in time it was forgotten. He told his son William that he was no namesake to any kith or kin, that there is nothing to a name but words.

  “A name is just a name. Not some titular conveyance of talent or wealth and position. Our lives are as freemen in a free nation of democratic laws that rewards industry and virtue. Each man has to make his own name in this republic. Each man has to begin the world anew.”

  Some thirty years later, when Dr. William Beaumont arrived at the Mackinac Island garrison, his ambition of making his name in this new world seemed finally to be within his grasp. The previous surgeon had died, likely apoplexy brought on by opium and drink. The hospital he left smelled of mice, their little black turds wedged into the floor's loose seams. Bats inhabited the rafters. When Beaumont first entered the hospital, he could clearly see the afternoon sun shine through chinks in the walls. His steward, Elias Farnham, showed him the chalk marks on the planking floor he had etched to indicate where, exactly, to set pails to catch the rainwater.

  In his first year on Mackinac Island, Beaumont lived alone in the garrison's physician's quarters, a four-room, pitch-roofed dwelling downhill from the hospital. Mrs. Farnham swept and dusted his rooms and tended to his meals and clothes. Like the hospital, his cottage was set apart from both the fort and the village. From his work table he had a view of the backs of the grand two-storied houses of Market Street, where the army's officers, Reverend James, Ramsay Crooks, and the company's managers resided.

  One afternoon an injured hound dog limped to his doorstep. Beaumont mended his paw, named him Rex, and let the hound in to sleep beside the fire.

  Among the officers and the officials of the American Fur Company corn whiskey was a st
aple. Swaying to their drink, they queried Beaumont, incredulous as they were at this new doctor's contentment to pass his vital years winter locked and celibate for near six months.

  “Ya' frig yer own prick or what then?” a red-nosed Captain Pearce asked him late into a winter's evening of camaraderie.

  Beaumont took no interest in his colleagues' advice on how to seduce an Indian girl. He was waiting for his betrothed, Deborah. She remained in Plattsburgh, New York, with her father, while the attorneys met discreetly to negotiate her divorce from Nathaniel Platt. Beaumont was devoted to Deborah and she to him. She had been alone in their childless home in the war-ruined city waiting for her husband, Nathaniel, to return from his travels. Nathaniel had no interest in the myrtle of Venus and kept at the bottle until dawn. There were stories of abominations he committed upon the stable boys. Then she had met Beaumont.