Chapter 5 - Intellectual and Social Life

Inasmuch as this chapter deals with intellectual and social affairs, it will be convenient for me to change my pronouns from the singular to the plural, thus including my wife and later the boys who came to broaden and bless our lives. When my wife and I left our old Missouri home, the kindly agent, a friend from childhood, checked our numerous trunks to St. Louis saying nothing of extra baggage. Feeling that we had plenty of money to carry us comfortably to our future home, we took seats in the parlor car. On the way an acquaintance of mine asked an introduction to my handsome sister. Although I recognized this supposed relationship as a reflection on the features of my bride, we gladly accepted the deception and thus escaped the brand of newlyweds. The young man did his best to entertain my “sister” and we had a jolly time. When we reached St. Louis a villainous baggage agent heaped every piece of our luggage on the scales and took my breath away by demanding a large sum for extra weight. I had to pay, and we rode that night in a day coach to Chicago. Fortunately the trunks were now checked to Ann Arbor and we had no fear of another wicked baggageman; so we removed the stains of travel so far as possible and again seated in a parlor car we finished our journey.

In Ann Arbor we rented a cottage on Jefferson Street and entered upon the cares and joys of housekeeping, about which we were quite ignorant. It is exhilarating to sail on unknown seas, keeping a sharp outlook for hostile shores and hidden rocks. The courage of youth is an alluring, if not an altogether trustworthy, guiding star. Some follow it recklessly without regard to the beacon lights built and maintained by nature at danger points, and are wrecked; while those who heed the signals reach the harbor of safety.

A few days after our installation in the cottage, a farmer whom we met on the street suggested that we would need some nice Hubbard squash for winter provender. We agreed. On our return we found that the farmer had transferred a wagon load of these esculent gourds to out cellar. When he came for his pay we remonstrated at the liberality with which he had provided for our sustenance, stating that we were only two in number and were not from Battle Creek and not exclusive vegetarians. Besides we preferred some variety in our dishes derived from plant life. This conference ended in the transference of a ridiculously small sum of money from our limited hoard to the farmer’s exchequer and the retention of the wagon load of Hubbard squash in out cellar. Laughingly we told our good and wise baker and grocer, Mr. Hendrickson, on State Street, of our predicament. He advised us not to be disturbed, that the cottage cellar was nice and dry, and that he would draw on our supply as needed through the winter and would credit our account at current prices. If our subsequent small investments had yielded equivalent profits we would now be riding in a Lincoln or a Pierce Arrow instead of a Ford.

It is but a slight exaggeration to say that we lived that winter on Hubbard squash without cutting more than three. Our Huguenot ancestors would have attributed this good fortune to a special act of Providence on our behalf, but we have attributed it to the wisdom of the grocer and have held his name in blessed memory. At any rate this is an illustration of how Fate protects newlyweds and other incompetents.

Our adventures into the social field were even more propitious than our investment in Hubbard squash, but in quite a different way. They brought us friendships which not only nourished our intellectual lives through the winter but still after quite fifty years are returning rates of interest far above the legal limit. These friendship certificates are not quoted on the stock market, nor are they recorded in our pass book at the bank, but their face value is beyond the power of gold to purchase; their coupons are endless and may be clipped not only by us but by our descendants.

In my student days I was attracted to the Unitarian Church by the Sunday evening lectures of Charles Brigham the pastor. He was an erudite man; his subjects were well chosen; his diction was pleasing. The year of our marriage he died, and his mantle fell temporarily upon the shoulders of the Reverend Joseph Allen, professor in the Harvard Divinity School, and joint author with Greenough of Latin texts. Mr. Allen was our first table guest and we well remember our solicitude that all should go well and so it did. He partook of our simple fare, without Hubbard squash, with ease and grace. I introduced my bride to his small congregation and she was immediately accepted as she well deserved to be.

At that time there were but few Faculty members in the Unitarian congregation, among whom I may mention Doctor Donald Maclean, professor of surgery; Doctor John W. Langley, professor of general chemistry; Dean Charles E. Greene, of the Engineering School; and Professor William H. Pettee, head of the chair of geology. The last mentioned, with his charming wife and their only daughter, occupied the cottage next to ours. All these names have been transferred from the records of the living to the larger volumes of the dead, but the memory of their gracious reception of the boy and girl from old Missouri lingers with us as a priceless heirloom, which we wish to transmit to our children.

Outside of the Faculties there were others to whom we were equally indebted. To one of these I wish to pay a special tribute. This was William D. Harriman, known to all his neighbors as Judge Harriman. We gave the title with a loving, lingering intonation. At our modest club dinners he supplied the intellectual vitamines. Being a man of leisure he devoted most of his time to reading wisely and deeply of English and American literature. He knew the old time poets of both nations intimately and thoroughly. My interest in him and admiration for him were awakened by a paper read by him before the club, on Whittier, with selective readings. He was Mayor of Ann Arbor when I had the honor of representing the sixth ward on the Board of Aldermen.

In January, 1925, my wife and I, while spending a few weeks in St. Petersburg, Florida, learned that the judge was at Bradentown, that he was in his ninety-fourth year, and so benumbed by that great anesthetic, old age, that he seldom recognized his most intimate friends. We discussed the question of visiting him; we had not seen him for many years and feared that the visit would leave with us a painful impression. We had always known him as neat in dress, courtly in manner and witty in conversation. We did not wish to mar this memory picture which we had so long cherished. After much debate and many pros and cons we, with other old friends of his, eluded for a day the realtors of St. Petersburg and drove over the splendid Gandy Bridge on the excellent highway to the fair and flourishing city of Bradentown. We pulled the bell at a neat, vine-covered cottage and were welcomed by the judge’s daughter, with her charming face framed in snowy white hair. She welcomed us; said that he was at his breakfast; that he retired at eleven P. M. and arose at eleven A. M. She took me to the breakfast room saying, “See if he will recognize you.” At the table I found the familiar, graceful figure, smoothly shaven and neatly dressed. He seemed to be doing full justice to the large and savory dish of scalloped oysters in front of him. I pulled a chair close beside his and putting my lips to his ear I asked if he knew me. Blankly he inquired my name, what I wanted and where I came from. I whispered: “You dear old heathen; it does my soul good to see you devouring these bivalves.” I could almost see the memory cylinders in his brain turn as an old time courtly smile passed over his face; then, he said: “You are a doctor but I can’t recall your name.” I repeated my whisper with some modification. His face lighted up: “You are my doctor from home.’’ For some minutes he became the friend of old, radiant in countenance and fluent in speech. He said: “Being a Democrat in Florida is more popular than in Michigan; but being a Unitarian in Florida is anathema. There will always be one Unitarian so long as God lives.” On leaving, he said: “Come again; you will find me here; I am not going to die soon.”

I left the cottage bearing in the memory chamber of my brain a portrait of a saint, such as no old master ever painted.

One of the homes into which we had an early introduction was that of Professor Henry Frieze. The house, with a large garden, occupied the space now covered by St. Joseph’s Hospital. Doctor Frieze was professor of Latin language and literature from 1852 until his death in 1889. He was twice acting president of the University and was once urged to accept this position permanently, but preferred to limit his burdens and to devote his time to study. His ideals concerning the University have not yet been realized and there is no reason for believing that they will be in the near future. He believed in the divorcement of the undergraduate and the graduate teaching, confining the University to the latter, and the establishment of graduate schools in mathematics, science, philology, and so forth. The medical and law departments have become in part graduate schools, but the engineering department continues undergraduate teaching and no provision has been made for other graduate schools, but all graduate students are lumped together. The provision for junior colleges has partly relieved the burden thrown on the University. How far this will go I am not in a position to forecast. I am sure that the realization of Doctor Frieze’s dreams will not come so long as our universities are ranked by the number of students and not by the excellence of work done in them. In most of them at present elementary instruction dominates and, may I say it, cripples productive scholarship.

However this is not an essay on the functions of a university; I have written several essays on this subject, but being a man of peace, I have refrained from printing them.

At the time of which I am writing (1877-89) Doctor Frieze was engaged in revising his Virgil and writing of Italian artists and their works. We spent an evening or two a week, sometimes more, in his parlor. He would read us what he had written since our last visit, illustrating Italian art with photographs, and then he would play Beethoven, of whom he was a great admirer, and of whose compositions he was a skilful interpreter. He told us of the first time he, Andrew D. White and Thayer (the author of the Life of Beethoven) studying together in Berlin, heard Wagner’s music. It was so different from that of Beethoven that they compared the two and passed judgment on the future estimation in which each would be held. After arguing he played a Beethoven sonata and the three agreed that Wagner would never supplant their adored master.

Doctor Frieze was responsible for the purchase of the Columbian organ by the University and for the founding of the Musical Society and the School of Music. Of the latter I was one of the Directors for many years. This honor is, however, no evidence of my musical ability. The function of the Board of Directors was to look after financial needs, while Professor Stanley, the real Director, cared for the professional accomplishments. In the early days the School of Music was seriously threatened with financial disaster. We were in debt to the extent of many thousands of dollars and the Directors were individually responsible. The students did not care for classical music and would not buy tickets. It was proposed that we open the season with a concert by a popular band of national repute. Professor Stanley protested and in doing so addressed me: “Doctor, how would you like to have homeopathy taught as a part of the medical curriculum ?” I had never before understood that the musician regards ragtime as the physician looks upon a cult. I took Stanley’s side and joined him in his protest. Then some wise man on the Board suggested that we make the first concert so good that no one could afford to miss it. With the help of Madame Schumann-Heink we did this and within a few years were out of debt. The purpose of the University Musical Society was to educate the members of the faculties, their families, the students and the citizens in good music. Any excess in one year’s receipts has been spent in making the program for the next better. In this way Professor Stanley has met with great success. His firm stand for the best in music has educated even his own Board of Directors. The first time I sat on this Board I learned something. The Board was negotiating with the greatest prima donna of the time. She submitted her contract, or her agent did, stating that she never sang for less than a thousand dollars a night. Then I read the first claim in the contract I said that it was impossible; but I was advised to read further on, and in doing so found that reductions for cash and other provisions made the charge quite within our means. Thus there are, or at least were, advertising tricks to which even prima donnas resort. I know nothing of the present market price at which great singers sell their musical wares.

From the first the Chicago Orchestra, under Theodore Thomas and later under Frederick Stock, has rendered valuable aid to the University of Michigan Musical Society.

However my purpose is to record the fact that the University of Michigan owes its present development in musical education to the initiation of Professor Henry Frieze, whose interest in this direction has been carried on since his death by Professor Francis Kelsey, to whom the University also owes its present reputation in archeological research. To both of these men I owe much. In the early days when my studies led me to seek a new word I sought the help of Professor Frieze and later that of Professor Kelsey. With their approval I have ventured to introduce into the dictionary of science new words, some of which, at least, have become standard terms. Before turning back into the lines suggested by the title of this chapter I wish to say that my training in the appreciation of good music has entered so far into my inward self that when I hear jazz, even Whiteman’s improved variety, in a hotel dining room, I am either seized with acute indigestion or my proclivity to forceful expression is restrained with difficulty or not at all.

Doctor Frieze had the unconscious habit when walking with one, of throwing an arm about the waist or shoulder of his companion. He, my wife and I often sauntered through the campus, along State Street, or among the roses in his garden, my wife in the middle, he with his arm about her waist, and I on the other side or following behind, proud of his affectionate attitude toward my bride. There were several newlyweds on the Faculties at that time and the males would brag about the attitude of the beloved master toward their mates.

To be with Professor Frieze was to receive lessons in grace and courtesy. He was my ideal of a learned man. I could not make of him a Trojan hero; not even an Æneas; he was Virgil himself. The admiration of Doctor Frieze, held by my wife and myself, led us to give to our fourth son, born about the time of Doctor Frieze’s death, his name. During the World War an engineer officer (Colonel Crocker) said to me in the Cosmos Club: “I have just voted into our society a man about whom I know little besides his name.” I said that that was not a safe procedure. “No,” he replied. “It usually is not, but this man’s name is Henry Frieze Vaughan.” After all there is something in bestowing a good name on a son.

In the old days which my memory is now reviewing, the center of intellectual and social life in Ann Arbor was in the home of President and Mrs. Angell. Doctor Angell’s presidency extended through thirty-eight years (187 1-1909) and he died in 1916. The President’s house on the campus, was not quite so large or so pretentious as it now is, but during the years mentioned thousands enjoyed its hospitality. The Faculty was not so large then and even assistants knew personally and drew inspiration from their seniors, not only in their own specialties, but in all. The Faculty was one large family group, the members mingling with no stressed formality. Students in groups were received and given occasion to observe the social amenities of life as dispensed by their cultured host and hostess. Professor Frieze once remarkd to me that the greatest pleasure he found in being a teacher was to watch the growth mentally and socially of the students from their freshman to their senior years.

Even now when I meet learned lawyers, skilled engineers and wise physicians at alumni gatherings I recall the social as well as the intellectual conditions of their student lives. Deans and professors and their wives followed the example set by President and Mrs. Angell, and socially entertained their assistants and students.

There were at that time in Ann Arbor no nice hotels, and the Michigan Union, that experimental college of social training, was still in the womb of the future. During the thirty-eight years of which I am writing, men and women of all degrees and varieties of greatness, from all parts of the world, came to the University and were entertained in the home of the President or in those of the professors, most frequently in the former. It became the custom of each host to see that such of his colleagues as might be interested in the visitor should have the opportunity to see him. The venerable President Eliot said to me a few years ago to this effect: “You were fortunately situated at Ann Arbor; every man of intellect went to Ann Arbor to see Doctor Angell and no one went without returning richer.” The man who spoke these words was one of our most highly prized visitors and he never came without leaving us richer. I remember his coming into my laboratory one afternoon when the splendid Harvard medical buildings were being planned and asking me to show him the arrangement that we had made for the care of our experimental animals in our much simpler laboratories, recently constructed. There was nothing in an educational way foreign to the mind of this great college president. I also recall his showing me the Harvard medical buildings when they were completed.

He took me through every laboratory and as we stood in the splendid court, he asked if I felt a pang of jealousy. I said, “No; I am glad to see medicine properly housed in at least one great university.” I felt no pang of jealousy but a spirit of elation in the recognition of the esteem in which this eminent college president held medical science. Medical education in this country owes much to Doctor Eliot and the splendid school which developed so greatly under his fostering care. One feels that medicine has broken the shackles of empiricism when it receives the recognition and help of such men as he.

In my opinion, there were three great university presidents at that time. They were Charles Eliot of Harvard, Andrew White of Cornell and James Angell of Michigan. There were other worthy men performing this function at that time and there are worthy successors, but I am sure that I am disparaging no memory nor discounting the service of any living man by giving these names.

In the early morning of a spring day in 1911, I was hurrying along the diagonal walk across the campus, on the way to my laboratory to see how my guinea pigs and rabbits were responding to my treatments, when I saw a man behaving queerly. He seemed to be consulting a sheet of paper which he carried in his left hand; then he went from tree to tree, patting each in a caressing manner with his right hand. Thinking that I had detected a patient escaped from the psychopathic ward I left the walk and approached the strangely behaving individual. He was standing by a tree and patting it when he heard me approach and turned quickly. In my surprise I cried out: “Mr. White! What does this mean?” He said: “Yesterday while sitting in my library at Ithaca I happened to think that fifty years ago to-day the class of 1861 planted these trees under my direction I had among my papers a plot of the ground, the location of each tree and the name of the student who planted it.” Then he added, with tears in his eyes: “There are more trees alive than boys.”

In those days we entered the President’s residence by the back door on the campus; the front door was only for strangers or when receptions were being given. Not infrequently the bell brought the President himself to the door in his slippers and with a gracious welcome on his face. Informal lunches and dinners were frequent and we were invited to meet distinguished guests.

When I read a book by Lord Bryce, and I believe that I have read all that he has written, I have a memory picture of this great Englishman. He sits in a Morris chair in the Angell drawing room; he wears a worn smoking jacket of uncertain, but varied color; his feet in carpet slippers, with gray woolen socks down to the ankles, rest on a stool; his necktie is all awry and he is anything but a fashionably dressed man, but he is talking about his travels in strange and remote parts of the earth, in Iceland, in the Polish and Hungarian Alps, in Transcaucasia, or he is discoursing on Democracy. We are listening; his talk is an informal and most instructive lecture.

Every one who has written about Sir Frederick Pollock emphasizes his silence. In this respect his reputation quite exceeds that of President Coolidge. Sir Frederick is silent not only in voice but in facial expression; President Coolidge does smile. Sir Frederick is a most learned man; he knows more about law than Lycurgus did because he knows all the laws that Lycurgus gave the Spartans and all that have been given since; at least so far as they are worth knowing. This is a heavy burden for any man to bear and I have noticed that even a jolly Irishman is not given to talk while he has a loaded hod on his shoulders. In other words, my guess is that Sir Frederick’s silence is due to the fact that he knows too much. I am not sure that this diagnosis will hold in the case of President Coolidge. My training as a physician causes me to recognize that similarity in symptoms does not always imply identity in etiology. I may ask the National Research Council to induce some erudite scientist to investigate the etiology of silence.

In the meantime, I may relate that Sir Frederick was the guest of President Angell for some days while giving a course of lectures in the Law School. I should interject that both he and President Coolidge can talk in public but are strangely silent socially. One afternoon a note came to the laboratory from Mrs. Angell. The import was as follows: “Bring Mrs. Vaughan to dinner and do make Sir Frederick talk; he sits at the table, stares into vacancy but says nothing. Make him talk if you have to be rude to him.” We sat at the table with our hostess between us. I made many attempts to fulfill my mission but all were failures. The distinguished guest did not even look at me. Finally in a desperate effort I said: “Sir Frederick, why is it that there are no great schools of law in England and that all barristers read in Inns of Court as they did a century ago; is this due to English conservatism?’ The great man dropped his knife and fork. He brought his fist down on the table with sufficient weight to endanger the dishes; he fairly shouted: “English conservatism! It is damned stupidity.” Then through the dinner and evening we listened to a most learned disquisition on methods and systems of legal instruction.

The engineers of his day regarded Francis Hopkinson Smith a great novelist while the novelists admitted that he was a great engineer. He once told me that his greatest ambition was to rebuild the fallen Campanile in Venice, but at that time he was engaged in the lighter occupation of sketching the picturesque spots of the city in the sea. I do know that in pre-Volstead days he was a most entertaining companion, especially as the midnight hour approached or receded; then he would give most inimitable readings from Colonel Carter of Cartersville.

The great and original Joseph Jefferson came occasionally, only too rarely for us. After answering a knock at the President’s study door one day I informed him that a bevy of college girls begged a presentation and I added that every girl admired him. Graciously bidding me to usher them in, he said: “It is not Joseph Jefferson that they admire. It is old Rip. I never knew a girl who did not love the old scamp.”

Wu Ting Fang was a picturesque and entertaining visitor. In his full Chinese regalia his social discourse, sparkled with wit, revealed a breadth of view and a spirit of toleration seldom expressed by either American or European, and showed an intellectuality that would have done honor to a man of any race. One of his witticisms, as I remember it, was something as follows: “Shanghai is the best place to be born in, because there I is made a superior baby cradle; Pekin is the best place to live in on account of the excellence of the food and the skill of its cooks; Canton is the best place to die in because there are made the most comfortable coffins.”

Both Doctor and Mrs. Angell were intolerant of any exhibition of self superiority. In 1885 Charles Kendall Adams, previously professor of history at Michigan, became president of Cornell. Some months after assuming his new duties, he made a visit to Ann Arbor, and my wife and I were invited to dine with him at Doctor Angell’s. As we pulled our chairs out at the table, he asked: “Mrs. Angell, do you think fifteen dollars apiece enough for a university president to pay for dining room chairs?” The answer came without hesitation: “I do not know, President Adams; mine cost two dollars apiece but they have been occupied by some very nice people.” Later in the dinner President Adams took up a salt cellar and spoke of it as a fine sample of cut glass. “Yes,” said the hostess, “it is pretty. I bought it at the ten cent store.”

On another occasion a young man from New York came with a letter of introduction and gave a parlor talk in the President’s house. The large drawing room was filled with professors and their wives. The young man talked about New York society and the famous Four Hundred of that time. The sum and substance of his speech was that only millionaires contributed to society in the metropolis. I sat near Doctor Angell. He was plainly irritated by the views expressed by the speaker. He whispered to me: “When he stops I am going to ask you to say a few words. Hit him and hit him hard.” When the man stopped, Doctor Angell said: “Doctor Vaughan goes to New York occasionally and I am asking him to say something about New York society as he sees it.” I stated that I knew nothing of the society described; I had recently visited the city.

I was on professional business and as the weather was warm I went rather scantily and cheaply clothed. Doctor Abraham Jacobi, seeing me at the professional meeting, insisted that I dine with him. I accepted. The night was very hot and we dined in our shirt sleeves. The other guests were George P. Putnam and Nathan Straus, and I was foolish enough to think that I was in good society.

An instructor on a small salary brought his bride to Ann Arbor. She gave a ladies’ luncheon to which Mrs. Angell was invited. The courses were many and bountiful. On bidding her hostess adieu, Mrs. Angell said: “Will you and your husband dine with us informally at seven o’clock Friday? Be sure, however, that our meal will be simple. My husband’s salary is small.”

Grover Cleveland came more than once and had in the Faculty many supporters, although the University was supposed to be a stronghold of Republicanism. President Cleveland for a time hesitated between Princeton and Ann Arbor as a place of residence on his retirement. At least he spoke to me once on this matter during his second term He appreciated life in an intellectual atmosphere; he approved of plain living and high thinking; he was democratic not only in politics but in his daily life. One night during his second term I was at a play in a Washington theater. When the curtain went down there was a somewhat unseemly and a certainly unnecessary rush for the doors. Caught in the crowd I found myself thrown, though not roughly, against Mr. Cleveland. I apologized as together we pushed our way out. I remarked that it was too bad that the President of the United States should be subjected to so much rudeness. He replied that he was not there as the President, but as an ordinary citizen, and expected to be treated as such.

He was willing to take his chance; he was in no way superior and was among his equals.

Some have said that Benjamin Harrison wore his grandfather’s hat. From the glimpses I had of him this insinuation is wholly without warrant. He wore his own hat and it covered good brain tissue. I once had quite a long chat with him. It was about the time when President Roosevelt took a somewhat arbitrary course in the deal about the Panama Canal. Mr. Harrison castigated President Roosevelt rather severely and I said that had he (Mr. Harrison) been president the action would not have been taken. “No,” said Mr. Harrison, “nor would it have been done if Grover Cleveland had been president.” Then he launched into an eulogy of Cleveland which quite surprised me. Mr. Harrison was a man of great legal ability, which he exhibited in his practice and in his arguments in international matters. His inaugural address in 1889 almost reconciled me to his defeat of Mr. Cleveland

Theodore Roosevelt came, with his military attaché in full uniform, while he was Governor of New York. I had much respect for Mr. Roosevelt and voted for him for President in 1904, but I never was a hero worshipper. On his visit to Ann Arbor, Doctor Angell gave a luncheon at which I had the honor of a seat next to the distinguished visitor. A few weeks later Doctor Angell and I rode with Governor Roosevelt from Albany to New York, pleasantly renewing our acquaintance. Both at the luncheon and on the train Governor Roosevelt reminisced about the Cuban Campaign in 1898. He had recently published an article or given an interview in which he said that he had encouraged the charge at San Juan Hill, cheering some and swearing at others. Some clergyman had asked him to deny that he had sworn at any one. At this Governor Roosevelt laughed most heartily. The military display which accompanied President Roosevelt’s public appearances irritated me. I recognized that the persons of our chief executives were entitled to special protection. We had had our lessons in this matter in the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, but I queried if this protection could not have been even more efficiently given with less display. That President Roosevelt had no personal fear was plainly shown by his behavior at Milwaukee when an attempt was made upon his life. When he accepted the nomination of the Bull Moose faction in 1912 my critical attitude of mind toward him developed into one of hostility.

Woodrow Wilson came twice, once while president of Princeton and again soon after the announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. Indeed his lecture at Ann Arbor was one of the first after this important event. A delegation of citizens met him at the station as he came up the platform carrying a heavy valise. We relieved him of his burden, took him to make a call upon President Angell, then somewhat infirm, and conducted him to the Opera House filled with Ann Arborites of all political creeds and to whom I introduced him. His address w as a literary gem and awakened the greatest enthusiasm. Of course in introducing him I predicted that the ides of November would see his election, but I had no idea at that time that my prediction would come true. At the luncheon following, he and I discussed Princeton affairs and especially the recently appointed president, Dr. Hibben, of whom Mr. Wilson spoke in praise. A few weeks later at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association at Atlantic City I sat by the side of Professor Councilman of Harvard, while Governor Wilson addressed the audience. Councilman thought that there was only one other man in America who could give so scholarly an address and that man was President Eliot; while I expressed the opinion that the other man was President Angell. At his first’ election I voted for Mr. Wilson with greater enthusiasm than I had ever felt in the exercise of that function. I appreciated the great things he accomplished in his first term, especially did I approve of the establishment of Federal Reserve Banks. My long experience on the Board of Directors of one of our local banks had given me some right to hold an opinion on this matter. But I was greatly irritated by his apparent tardiness to help our European friends. His failure to enter the contest after the sinking of the Lusitania drove me wild, and I joined in more than one telegram or memorial to him. These were met with only polite acknowledgments by Mr. Tumulty.

I was somewhat cheered by President Wilson’s request to the National Academy of Sciences in April, 1916, appoint a committee to advise him on scientific matters in case of emergency; but the shout that “He has kept us out of the war” during the campaign rekindled my antagonism. When Mr. Hughes was nominated I said, “There is the man for whom I will vote.” Every speech made by Mr. Hughes rendered this decision more doubtful; the day cat before the election arrived with my vote still uncertain.

There is in Washtenaw County a township, Freedom, in which at that time few of the voters spoke anything but their Swabian dialect.

I had frequently been called to their homes in consultation and among them I was known as the “Prussian doctor” on account of the brogue I employed in endeavoring to ascertain their symptoms. My wife and I talked the matter of our votes over, and on the day before the presidential election in 1916, we drove through Freedom in our Ford eating fruit and drinking cider with our Swabian friends. At each home we asked, “What about your vote to-morrow?” The invariable reply was: “We vote for Hughes.” This settled the matter with us. The next day we voted for Wilson.

I am not competent to pass judgment on President Wilson. Time alone can do that and what the verdict of the future will be no one of the present can know. Mr. Lansing’s book, in my opinion, condemns its author quite as strongly as it labors to convict his chief. Even the Page letters which I enjoy greatly, rasp on my nerves and I believe them to be unfair. Mr. Page, a most able man in London, among his English friends, practically in the midst of the war, saw one side of the shield. President Wilson in Washington, with his hand on the pulse of the nation, made up of many nationalities, with diverse heredity and environment, with conflicting social, intellectual and economic interests, saw both sides of the shield. Indeed the crystal of divination through which he looked had many facets and each gave a different picture.

During the presidential campaign in 1896 there was a big Republican rally in Ann Arbor. McKinley, Alger, Thurston, Mason and others, high in the party council, were there. The distinguished visitors were assigned to several homes without regard to party affiliations. All citizens were to be Republicans for that day at least.

Senators Mason and Thurston, with the latter’s wife, were our guests. At the mass meeting I sat between Mrs. Thurston and my wife. McKinley discussed the tariff; Alger appealed to the old soldiers; Thurston denounced the solid South; Mason and others told stories, some good, some bad. I joined in the applause most vociferously. Mrs. Thurston evidently had heard her husband’s speech before and now and then she would whisper: “Listen, something good is coming.” Then the distinguished senator from the Sunflower State would hold before our astonished gaze and wave most frantically the bloody shirt. In the applause which followed I joined with increased vigor. After the speaking a group repaired to our dining room. My colored office boy and family butler, neat in his tuxedo, drew upon the wine cellar, then fairly replete with the vintages of France and California; alas! I did not then know that wine cellars, like Troy, were soon to be known only in tradition. Mrs. Thurston told exultantly how her escort had led the applause, especially when her husband was speaking. Then I confessed that I had been born a Democrat, that I did not believe a word that her husband or others had spoken, and that my behavior at the mass meeting had been prompted solely by my gallantry towards her. This confession detracted in no way from the jollity of the occasion but in fact increased the merriment. I voted for McKinley at the election, but it was Sir. Bryan and not the speeches I heard that night that led to my deflection from that party whose standard I had supported since my first presidential vote in 1872 for Horace Greeley.

On my return from Cuba in 1898, General Alger, Secretary of War, took me to President McKinley and asked me to tell him my opinion of the defects in the campaign which had contributed so greatly to the privations of our soldiers. This I did without hesitation and without reserve. The President heard me with patience and dismissed me with thanks. I am sure that our country was fortunate in having McKinley instead of Bryan at the helm in the Cuban crisis. This view I adhere to notwithstanding my full recognition of the fact that in many respects the Spanish-American War was conducted in a manner of which we have no cause to be proud.

Professor Paul Ehrlich, the discoverer of salvarsan (606), which, with its congeners, has proven so valuable in the treatment of syphilis and a few allied diseases, was with his wife once a guest at our home for some days. He lectured to the medical students, met the Faculty and proved to he a most desirable and interesting guest. He spoke no English, though his wife was most proficient in the use of our tongue. On his return to Germany he advised his friends, contemplating a visit to this country, not to admit any knowledge of English. If you follow this advice, said he, your American friends will make full provision for your traveling and accommodation and will send an escort with you. When in Ann Arbor he made frequent requests to see an Indian and was most surprised and disappointed at our inability to satisfy his desire. At a dinner in Berlin a few years later he told the story as follows: “I wanted to see an Indian. Vaughan said there were none thereabouts; I asked him if he had ever seen one. ‘Oh yes, I saw one at Buffalo Bill’s show in Berlin.’”

One morning at breakfast, finding a shredded wheat biscuit on his plate, Ehrlich looked at it from all sides and inquired: “Was ist das‘“ He was told that it was “Weizen.” “Ich werde es diskutieren; es schmeckt gut.” He ate two. Professor Welch once asked me how it was that while Johns Hopkins paid Ehrlich’s way over here and Chicago University gave him a degree, on his return he talked more about Ann Arbor. I will now confess how we won the heart of this great scientist. My colleague, Professor Huber, had once worked in Ehrlich’s laboratory and knew that he was limited to three cigars a day by his physician. We sent to New York and secured a box of the strongest, blackest cigars in the market. It was through these that we won the great man’s affection, but I will not swear that he followed his physician’s advice in their use.

In 1907 I went to Berlin and soon hastened to the Institute for Infectious Diseases where Professor Wassermann was perfecting his scientific test in the diagnosis of syphilis. He welcomed me; said that he would instruct me in his technique, and I could carry it to America. We went to work immediately and continued without interruption until he, looking at his watch, announced that it was four o’clock and that we would go out and find a lunch. In our walk we came to the military barracks. He inquired if I knew the purpose of the great building. On my replying in the affirmative he became eloquent and declaimed as follows: “There are fifty thousand soldiers quartered in Berlin and a proportionate number in other German cities, They do nothing but scatter gonorrhea and syphilis.” Growing more intense in his words he added: “I fear that the time may come when the militarism of Germany will endanger the peace of the world and possibly wreck the empire.”

During the war I often thought of this prophetic speech and expressed the hope that I might live to see the day when I would walk with Professor Wasserman along the streets of Berlin under the flag of a stable German republic. Alas, that time has not come and my friend is dead!

It was my good fortune to meet several times the great Russian scientist and biologist, Elie Metschnikoff. He might have sat for a portrait of a typical nihilist. His long hair and heavy beard, as black as a crow in earlier life, tinged with gray in advancing years, evidently received but little attention. He would sit for minutes apparently in deepest thought and utterly oblivious of those about him, biting his nails. Then he would break into most fluent and correct French, always apologizing for being compelled to speak in a foreign language. His words were at times profound and at times biting with satire. In science at least he was anything but a nihilist. His work was constructive and rational. He was the founder and defender of the phagocytic theory. I believe that the essential facts of this theory, as he discovered and interpreted them, will not be discarded by the scientific world. They may be modified, since the discovery of absolute and perfect truth is hardly within the realm of human endeavor. In 1907 I was at a dinner at Wassermann’s house. Besides the wise host and the fair hostess there were Metschnikoff, Erhlich, Wright, Strong and myself. Metschnikoff said there is dogma in science as well as in religion. If a German does not believe in Erhlich’s side chain theory, he is damned.

In 1891 my wife and I attended an International Congress of Hygiene in London. We reached England some weeks before the session and leisurely journeyed from Liverpool, visiting Oxford, Stratford, Kenilworth and other points of historic interest and natural loveliness. In London I found an invitation to attend a gentlemen’s dinner to be given by Sir Joseph Lister to those who were to read papers in his section at the Congress. This quite elated me and filled me with anticipation. On the afternoon of the day named for the dinner we attended a garden party at the beautiful home of Baroness Burdett-Coutts at Holly Lodge, Highgate. Her handsome husband, Mr. William Ashmead-Bartlett, as an American, took us in tow and showed us the indescribable beauties of the place.

On returning to London I found that I had short time to dress and reach Lister’s home. I hurriedly made the change in apparel, called a hansom, and was on my way to 12 Park Lane when I discovered that I had no small money. Fortunately I had time to celebrate, a function which I exercise slowly; the cab stopped at the curb; a man in livery stood ready to open the cab door and another to perform a like function at the door of the mansion. I alighted, asked cabby the fare and being informed that it was a shilling, I held out a gold sovereign. He had no change. I had figured in my painful moments of cerebration that this would happen. I was a few minutes late and I had been told that in England it was held to be a crime to be late at a formal dinner. I had not been informed of the penalty attached to this crime, but I knew that English justice was speedy and uncompromising. I could not run around the corner and have gold transmuted into silver. I had already, during the drive, decided on the action I should take in the emergency.

With as lordly an air as I could assume, another painful process, I handed the sovereign to the man in livery, told him to give cabby a shilling and to pocket the remainder. This seemed wholly satisfactory. During the dinner this servant stood behind my chair, and, do my best, I could not lower the levels in my wine glasses.

Everything was going well and I was congratulating myself upon the successful result of my cogitations when Professor Carl Frankel, of the University of Berlin, who had been my instructor in bacteriology in Koch’s laboratory three years before, announced that he had a joke on the Americans. Knowing something of Frankel’s jokes, my knees began to tremble and I sent up a silent but fervent prayer that the Lord might strike Frankel dead. But there was no divine interposition and Frankel ruthlessly and murderously proceeded. He informed the expectant diners that on the day before when the American delegates to the Congress were being presented to the Prince of Wales, the representative of the crown of England, one of these uncouth and uncultured aborigines said, “My dear Sir, I am glad to meet you. My name is Wales and I think we must be related.” I am sure that if I had arisen and shouted an oath there could not have been more consternation among the English at the table. A few foreigners who had understood the story laughed; but most of their faces were covered with interrogation points. They knew that something had happened but they had not the remotest idea what it was. Frenchmen, Italians, and even Germans, since Frankel had spoken in broken English, sought the eyes of their compatriots. I sought surcease from sorrow by trying to empty .’1 my wine glasses at once but my faithful servitor frustrated this plan.

In my pain I realized that Lady Lister’s eyes were tracing the faces on my side of the table and finally I was conscious that they rested on me. Then I heard her voice, soft and sweet, as the tone of a fair hostess should be, inquiring: “Doctor Vaughan, you are the only American at the table, and what have you to say about the story?” This seemed my death knell. I made no attempt to reply. In my extremity the Lord sent relief. At the table was Doctor W. D. Miller, then dean of the Dental School of the University of Berlin, an American by birth, a graduate of Michigan and an old friend of mine. He replied to Lady Lister’s interrogation saying: “Pardon me, Lady Lister, Doctor Vaughan is not the only American at the table. Although I represent a German university, I am an American, and while my colleague’s story is a good one, there is no truth in it.” I revived sufficiently to call the function of the servitor behind my chair into operation again, and later when our hostess had retired I saw peace in rings of smoke from a fine Havana.

When Doctor Miller and I left the house I embraced him and told him that he had saved my life; the story that Frankel had told was true. The surgeon general of our Navy at that time was Philip Wales and he perpetrated the joke as Frankel told it. The Prince of Wales (afterward Edward VII) said, “Yes, we are cousins; come and meet your other cousins,” and our surgeon general had the honor of being introduced to the whole royal family, or as many of them as were within reach. There is an account of this dinner with a list of guests in the excellent life of Lord Lister, but the book makes no mention of the story I have told.

It would be superfluous, and in a sense incongruous, for me to speak in praise of Lord Lister. It would be like a pigmy pouring a libation to a god. In person Lord Lister was most imposing, his fair face beaming with the intelligence and benignity of generations of inherited Quaker refinement, learning and culture. Lady Lister was the daughter of the great Syme, the surgeon of Edinburgh of the preceding generation. My first teacher in surgery and subsequently my colleague in the Michigan Faculty, Donald Maclean, like Lister, was a product of Syme’s teaching; and I had heard stories of this original character since my freshman days. I fancied that I could detect a striking resemblance between Lister and Maclean and as I looked into the face of the former, I recalled the old days in the seventies, when, as Maclean’s assistant, I had spent hours drenched in the poisonous sprays of carbolic acid. The lesser son of Syme had attempted to follow in the footsteps of his greater brother.

At this Congress I met many distinguished men of various nationalities. I desire to mention here the names of three Englishmen who were then doing good work and who subsequently added to their laurels. Professor Adami, at that time professor of pathology in McGill University, Montreal, is now Chancellor of the University of Liverpool. He gave the oration at the laying of the cornerstone of our new medical building in 1901. G. Sims Woodhead became professor of pathology in the University of Cambridge and was knighted. He once made me a short visit in Ann Arbor. He died a few years ago.

Doctor A. Ruffer became medical adviser to the Egyptian government, did epoch making work on the diseases of the ancient Egyptians by studying their remains, thus creating the science of paleopathology, and became Sir Armand. He was lost in the Mediterranean during the war. I came in pleasant but brief contact with Blanchard, long professor of biology in the University of Paris. His personality was charming and his knowledge wide and diverse. At the Congress he discussed a paper of mine on meat poisoning and gave me valuable information concerning the poisonous fish of the West Indies.

On my first visit to England in 1888 I had the good fortune to meet Lauder Brunton, afterwards Sir Lauder. Our acquaintance began in the musty atmosphere of an old book shop. Both were poring over ancient tomes when, without letter of introduction or other formality, we began to talk. He invited me to dinner that evening at his home at 7 Portland Place. He added, “Without formality. My wife is at the seashore and only my niece and I will be present.” ‘I arrayed myself in a Prince Albert with white vest and striped trousers and covered myself with a high hat. In this costume I was admitted to the vestibule and conducted to the drawing room by a servant. I found Doctor Brunton and his handsome niece in full dinner attire and was graciously requested to conduct the young lady to the dining room. The second edition of Brunton’s great work on pharmacology had just come from the press and I was presented with a copy. I was perfectly familiar with the first edition and the advance in this science, embryonic at that time, supplied abundant material for conversation. However I was somewhat ill at ease and when the lady had retired and I was being consoled by the wine, tobacco and the closer intimacy of my host, I laughingly said to him: “Our great American essayist and philosopher, Emerson, has written: ‘There is a consolation in being well dressed that religion does not afford, and now I could testify that there is a misery in the soul due to being improperly dressed that all the consolations of religion can not relieve.” The conversation grew more personal and intimate and this great doctor detailed to me his early struggles in establishing himself in a consultation practice in London. In my classes I used his second edition as I had done with the first and our acquaintance through occasional correspondence continued as long as he lived, but I never saw him again until 1897 in St. Petersburg. We were standing in line awaiting the stamp of approval by a bearded Russian official on our credentials. Over my shoulder he caught my name on my paper and acquaintance was renewed most pleasantly but too shortly. At that particular time for some trifling political reason, which I have long since forgotten if I ever knew, Americans were more popular in Russia than Englishmen and on account of my nationality I was able to be of some slight service to him. In my opinion, Sir Lauder Brunton has never been so highly honored by scientific men as his work deserves, but in the annals of pharmacology his name will occupy a most distinguished place. At least his memory will ever be green among his friends so long as they live. Brunton gave me a letter of introduction to Professor J. Burdon-Sanderson, but my acquaintance with this eminent man was regrettably short. He at Oxford, and Professor Michael Foster at Cambridge, did much to develop modern biologic research in these ancient and honorable universities.

In 1888 Doctor Novy and I, with the prospect of opening our laboratory of hygiene that fall, hastened to Berlin to take the course in bacteriology in Koch’s laboratory. We were advised to secure letters from the President of the United States or from the Secretary of State, and were told that without such we certainly would not be admitted, since applications were pouring in from all parts of the civilized world. However we went without troubling these dignitaries and found places without question. At that time Koch’s laboratory occupied a hastily converted dwelling at 36 Klosterstrasse and the laboratory instruction was given by Professor Carl Frankel with the assistance of Docents Kirchner and Herter. Professor Koch gave general lectures on hygiene and carried on his researches in a private room. Frankel was a most capable instructor, did good research work, wrote a book on bacteriology which we used in our first course and later became professor of hygiene at the University of Halle.

I can say nothing that would enhance the reputation of Robert Koch. He stands next to Pasteur as the founder of the science of bacteriology. As a village doctor in East Prussia he discovered the use of solid media in the growth of bacteria, and demonstrated their value in the identification and isolation of these low forms of life. He formulated the rules, compliance with- which must be shown before a given bacterium may be recognized as the sole and sufficient cause of a given disease. He did much to convert the germ theory of disease into a science. In 1882, after many months of untiring research, Koch identified, isolated and grew in pure cultures the bacillus of tuberculosis.

His studies in Egypt and India enabled him in 1884 to announce like success in his pursuit of the vibrio of Asiatic cholera. In later years he won other laurels and received the highest rewards that can come to a man of science.

While I was at work in the laboratory, Professor Koch summoned me to a conference in his private room. I felt highly honored to be thus distinguished, but the burden of his talk was the condemnation of the University of Michigan for retaining as its professor of pathology a man who did not accept the well established fact that bacteria cause disease, referring to Professor Gibbes, whose name Koch pronounced with bitterness, biting it into two syllables. I tried to explain that I was an antagonist of Professor Gibbes’ teaching and that my purpose in seeking instruction in Koch’s laboratory was to fit me better to combat my colleagues’ erroneous teachings, but I did not succeed in mollifying his anger. Robert Koch was a great man, but in many respects a typical German, ready to stamp upon those who did not acknowledge his authority. While I admired his work I could not be altogether pleased with his personality.

At the completion of our laboratory course, following the custom of the time, the students gave Professor Frankel and his assistants a kneipe, which might be defined as a “drinking bout.” If there were eatables they were negligible. The special drink at our feast was denominated pfirschebowle and consisted, so I was told, of fresh, peeled and chopped peaches, plentifully sprinkled with sugar, covered with Moselle wine and the whole allowed to ferment for some days in large earthen jars. This drink was served in long stemmed goblets. At the call ein one took hold of one’s glass; at zwei one raised the glass to one’s lips; and at drei one drained the contents. The inspector made a Nagel-probe. In other words there must not be enough wine left in the glass to moisten the thumb nail, but needless to say that as the feast progressed the test was neglected. We made speeches in the order of our sitting. Fortunately my time came second and consequently when I was not intoxicated. I began my speech in German, intending to drop into English, but my German proved so mirth-provoking that I was not permitted to make the transfer. I soon saw that my training in drinking would not permit me to drain my glass at every toast. I therefore bribed the waiter behind my chair to take my glass each time I raised it. He accepted both the bribe and the function, and my fellows were now too far gone to detect the deceit. In this way I managed to keep fairly conscious of what was going on throughout the feast. There were at the table Germans predominantly, a few Italians, two Mexicans and two Americans. One by one my comrades went under the table. Frankel arose and made a speech-I think his twentieth. This time he referred to the triple alliance and shouting “Noch einen Krieg! Noch einen Krieg!“ he joined the majority. The police came uninvited by us. They may have had an invitation from our landlord. The feast ended, and Herter and I procuring a cab took our distinguished instructor home and put him to bed.

After recovering from the feast Doctor Novy and I took our departure from Berlin; he, always pursuing knowledge with more zest than I, to the Pasteur Institute in Paris while I, with my old friend Dennison, visited Dresden, Vienna, Salzburg and spent some weeks in the Tyrol and Switzerland.

Later I joined Novy in Paris and through Roux’s kindly intercession I was presented to the man who, in my opinion, was the greatest product of the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur. This judgment must be just if human greatness be estimated by benefits conferred upon one’s fellows. Pasteur demonstrated that it is within the range of possibility for man to eradicate from the earth every infectious disease which may afflict himself or other living creatures. Man may never reach this great achievement but the demonstration of its possibility indicates that intellectually he has reached a stage in which he may become a coworker with his creator in leading his race toward the mountain tops of human perfection. But the ascent to these heights is steep and stony, while the alluring valleys of ignorance and indolence lying below are always tempting the masses. In the early eighties an Englishman, already advanced to middle life, entered the Medical School. He was an ideal gentleman, prepossessing in manner and speaking fluently French, German and Spanish. His name was Francis W. Brewer and it was rumored that he might legally attach a prefix to this name. Of this I do not know, but I do know that he would not have disgraced such a title. He was poor and I was able to help him financially by having him serve as an attendant to some of my more wealthy male patients. After his graduation he was in my office for a time. During the Chicago Exposition he served as sanitary supervisor of the buildings and grounds. Later he was made professor of hygiene in the State College of Utah at Logan, where he died. Recently I tarried for a short time in that prosperous looking little city and made inquiry for my old friend, but the present generation knew only the name and could give no particulars.

When I went to Europe in 1888 Brewer gave me two letters of introduction. One was to a director of the Kosmos Line at Hamburg, Germany. This letter I presented. It was graciously received with expressions of the highest esteem for its writer, and the German gentleman dined me at the Hamburg Club. He gave me advice as to my conduct in Germany, saying: “Do not tell any of your American stories. People will not believe them and will pronounce them lies. In a club like this one would expect to hear good stories, but I have heard only two. A member said that he had two of the best anecdotes in the world. One was too long to tell and the other rich beyond compare, but he had forgotten it.” Thus my friend belied his own advice. I found German wit by no means insipid and my lies were often believed while my truths were discredited. When I told my fellow students that there were houses in New York twenty or more stories in height they thought and sometimes said that I was lying. Then I told of a roadsign in Virginia having the inscription: “This is the road to Richmond; that is the road to Petersburg; those who can not read should consult the blacksmith nearby.” This statement led to the applause of the care and consideration displayed by the road superintendent.

Brewer’s second letter was to the Lord Mayor of London. I carried this to the Mansion House, handed it to the lackey and awaited its reception. The Lord Mayor himself came to the waiting room, greeted me most cordially and said that the bearer of a letter from his old friend Brewer would be the recipient of any favor he could bestow. I wished to attend a murder trial at the Old Bailey.

I saw three under the escort of the lord high sheriff in the picturesque regalia of his office. One day I went to see St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Doctor Brunton was not in, and the superintendent treated me rather rudely. I jumped into the waiting cab, drove to the Mansion House and expressed a desire to see “St. Barts.” With a letter from the Lord Mayor I returned and handed it to the superintendent. I was most graciously shown through that ancient institution. I am sure that to-day I would be welcomed by my friend, Sir Thomas Horder, were he not attending His Majesty. In 1891 my wife and I were guests at a garden party at the home of Sir Spencer Wells at Hempstead Heath. Some years later when I heard a German professor state in a lecture that Billroth as the first to perform an ovariotomy I protested in memory of Ephriam McDowell, Nathan Smith, the Atlees and Spencer Wells. One Sunday afternoon, after listening to Canon Farrar at Westminster, we were wandering through the tombs of the mighty when a lady and gentleman approached, introduced themselves and insisted that we take Sunday evening tea with them. Thus I became acquainted with Mr. Ballance, an English surgeon, and was the recipient of a presentation copy of his work on the ligation of arteries. Americans sometimes speak of the lack of cordiality among the English and I admit that they are not so demonstrative as the French, or as we are, but for real friendship and genuine hospitality they are unsurpassed. I have always felt as much at home, unless it be in some trivial custom, in England as I have in Boston and I am sure that some of my best friends live in the Hub. Socially and ethnologically, we are as much a part of the British Empire as is Canada.

It is true that the good mother, quite unwisely as she now admits, about a century and a half ago, attempted to dictate the tea drinking habits of her youngster, but like Troy, this is in the past.

About the middle of the nineteenth century Munich was a hotbed of typhoid fever. From 1807 to 1867 the annual death rate from this disease in that city averaged two hundred and three per one hundred thousand. The city was honeycombed with privy vaults and shallow wells. The contents of the former leaked into the latter, from which the people drank. About the later date there came to this city a young, intelligent epidemiologist, one of the first of his kind, by the name of Pettenkoffer. He induced the people to abandon their privy vaults and cesspools, to build a system of sewers and to bring a pure water supply from a mountain lake By these means the prevalence of typhoid fever was within a few years reduced to almost zero. Pettenkoffer did other great things beneficial not only to his fellow citizens but to the entire world. He and a colleague, Voight, devised an apparatus for determining the calorific value of foods and laid the foundation for the formulation of rational diet tables. No king ever did for Munich and Bavaria what this modest scientist did. In 1888 I spent some days with this great man. It was at the beginning of the long vacation. He and I sat in his room smoking Virginia cheroots-cheap cigars containing straws to improve the draft-while his students came in, one by one, to thank him for his instruction and to wish him a pleasant holiday. One was profuse in his thanks.

He said: “Professor, it has seemed to me that you have taken a personal interest in me and that you have spoken directly to me in your lectures.” Since Pettenkoffer was known as a great teacher as well as a great investigator I was much interested in the statement of this student, and on his retirement I asked what basis of truth there was in his assertion. “Perfectly true,” said the old teacher, “I always pick out the biggest fool in the class and talk directly to him, feeling that if he comprehends others will.” I had a valuable lesson in methods of instruction which I adopted with some success.

One morning in emerging from my hotel on my way to Pettenkoffer’s laboratory, I found the houses bedecked with flags, bands playing and soldiers marching. I engaged in the following conversation with an intelligent looking by-stander:

“What is it all about?”

“It is our king’s birthday.”

“I did not know that you had a king; I thought that Bavaria is ruled by Prince Luitpold, acting as regent; where is your king?”

“He is in an insane asylum, but this is his birthday.”

I decided to ask each intelligent loiterer on my way to direct me to the laboratory of Herr Professor von Pettenkoffer. I asked many before I found one who had ever heard the name. The man who had so greatly lowered the death rate was unknown while the name of the crazy Ludwig II was on the lips of all.

In 1894 Doctor Novy and I attended the International Congress on Hygiene at Budapest and heard Roux read his paper on diptheria antitoxin. This was given in an unventilated classroom of the musty old university. There were present many of the great men in preventive medicine from various parts of the world.

At the conclusion of the reading these men stood on their seats, shouted applause in all civilized tongues and threw their hats toward the ceiling. I have never before nor since seen such a demonstration at a scientific congress. Each delegate returned to his home with a bottle of this marvelous curative agent in his possession. Soon extensive laboratories for its production came into being on both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan and during the more than thirty years that have elapsed since that time the death rate from diphtheria has continuously declined. Similar preparations for the treatment of other diseases have been evolved and serum-therapy now has an important place among the achievements of science. Our sojourn in the double city on the Blue Danube was not given solely to attendance on the sessions of the Congress. One day we visited the beautiful and extensive estate of Count Esterhazy at Totis and lingered in his great wine caves. On another day we were entertained by the Countess Hunyadi Janos. Under the canopies erected for the comfort of visitors, wine and champagne flowed more freely than the justly celebrated laxative waters supplied by the wells near by.

The delegates to this Congress were invited to a court reception at the picturesque castle on the Buda side of the river. Our invitations told us how we were to be clothed, how we were to come and left but little chance for individual choice. We were received by an Archduke, a brother to the Emperor; In single file I found myself immediately behind the representative of Cambridge University, England, bearing on his person the highly colored academic robes. When he was presented I overheard the conversation.

The Archduke spoke to him in Italian; the Cambridge man said that he did not understand Italian. Then the host spoke in German and meeting with a similar reply he drew himself up and said in correct English most bitingly; “What, the representative of Cambridge University and speak only English!” Hearing this my heart was going pitapat, but it gave me time to think. I said to myself: “Old man, you can speak to me in any European language. I think I can recognize the language and can say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in it and that will be all that will be required of me.” So it was a toss up whether my answer should be “Yes” or “No.” He spoke to me in German, saying: “I understand you are a member of Congress.” I answered in the affirmative, thinking that he referred to the Hygienic Congress, or more probably I was too confused to think at all and my lips just formed the word of their own accord. Then he asked me to explain the difference between the House of Representatives and the Senate and the functions of each. I do not know how much misinformation I gave the archduke of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I was not concerned with the truth of my statements but gave my undivided attention to the correctness of my German.

In 1882, we (my wife and I) built a modest but commodious home of stone and brick on South State Street in which we were to live until 1921 when we left Ann Arbor. The house was the first residence designed by Mr. Irving Pond, now of Pond and Pond, Chicago architects. Mr. Pond points with interest to the designs on the old mantels which foreshadowed his future works. We built for permanency, dreaming that the house might serve as a family home through generations, but we considered only the corrosion of the elements and the crumbling hand of time. We did not have in mind the more rapidly progressive and the more irresistible encroachments of business. When, within a few years, we saw this approaching menace, we bought an adjacent lot and built a brick wall with stone pillars about the whole. We encysted ourselves, the new accession being converted into a small but beautiful garden under the skilful direction of our old time friend, O. C. Simonds, the landscape artist. The garden could be entered only through the house and became in summer the living and reception room, thus serving the family and enlarging our facilities for the entertainment of friends. No friend in the Faculty or among the citizens and no medical student escaped an invitation to a garden party. Indeed the uses to which we put the garden were many, not the least of which was that of a shower bath room. At bedtime the boys and I would strip and turn the hose up and down our spines. I have broken the ice to take a plunge, dived into the cold waters of Lake Superior, rushed from a steam bath to a cold pool in Russia, rolled in a bank of snow and fled to a hot tub, but I know nothing more cooling than a garden hose played on the spine on a hot night. Satisfaction comes quickly and completely.

In this house and garden we entertained our friends from near and from afar, while our boys profited by the imparted wisdom, wit and good cheer. Indeed, had some of our guests realized how critical five pairs of young ears may be, they would have been more cautious in some of their statements. Such entertainments were often followed by consultations of Webster, Worcester and other dictionaries for correct pronunciation and of the Encyclopedia Britannica and other reference books for facts.

With the purpose of broadening their intellectual horizons and at the same time making them content to eat what they found before them at table without asking questions, we placed each boy when he finished high school in a French boarding school in Switzerland. I am not sure about success in the first direction, but in the second the result was highly satisfactory. However, speaking more seriously, when the Great War came and the five sons were in the army and three of them in France, we recognized that their French pupilage had not been altogether in vain.

The family owes much to the men and women who honored us with their visits to the old home. Rare indeed was the one who did not leave with us some grain of good. Now we are compelled to entertain our friends at the club or in the hotel. This is not satisfactory. With friends in one’s own home there is a sense of personal possession that is foreign to a club or a hotel; it seems more transient and artificial; it is only the rind of hospitality; the meat of it is wanting; it is but the shell with the kernel gone.

Some of our friends did us the honor of dropping in unannounced. We considered this as a special compliment since they showed their perfect confidence in the sincerity of our welcome. One Sunday afternoon upon returning from a drive we found Doctor Abraham Jacobi sitting in the garden. He welcomed us by saying that, tiring of the bustle of New York, he had come to spend a few days in our garden. This dear man was always a most welcome guest, full of wit, wisdom and pathos. He came to us first in 1898. The University was to give him an LL. D. I went to Cuba and my wife expressed some apprehension of her ability to entertain one about whom she had heard so much but had never seen.

At the first breakfast, she reprimanded the youngest son who came to the table with but scanty attention to his dress. The kind guest said: I “Do not scold the boy; he will connect me with the reprimand, and I want him to like me.” This relieved her embarrassment and won the love of all the boys. He told them of his imprisonment and escape from Germany in 1848; how he hid a short pencil in his abundant hair, and how he planned revenge. This he won in a way he did not dream of in 1848, when he declined a professorship in the University of Berlin, saying that he could not accept an honor from a country which had treated him and his fellows so unjustly. On account of his small frame and large head so richly stored with knowledge our boys among themselves gave him the appellation of “Atlas,” bearing the world on his shoulders. They treasured some of his sayings, such as: “I have been too busy all my life to do anything.” “I know that the world is growing better because my East Side Jewish patients bear less vermin than formerly.”

Baron Takaki and Doctor Suzuki, fleet surgeon in the Russo-Japanese war, once paid our hospitality a compliment. Before dinner the Baron informed me that it was absolutely essential that they should reach Chicago early next morning. Their berths were secured and I divided my time between the conversation and consulting my watch. At last I informed the Baron that his cab was waiting. “Oh well,” said he, “let the train go. We can go to Chicago sometime tomorrow.”

We were entertaining Mr. Fletcher, the man who taught that each mouthful of food should have a grinding for every tooth, hence the verb “to fletcherize.”

The boys were keen in watching and one of them managed to say to me that he could not see that Mr. Fletcher was eating differently from the rest of us. It was too good to keep and I passed it on to Mr. Fletcher. Our jolly guest said: “Boys, I am not making a demonstration to-night. I am simply enjoying myself.”

My old comrade of the Typhoid Commission, Walter Reed, fresh from his brilliant research on the transmission of yellow fever, came, met our friends, lectured to the Faculties and students and received from the Regents an LL.D. Each year for many years I asked the Regents to bestow an honorary degree upon some eminent American physician or scientist. I have before me a list of these men but it is too long for insertion.

For the greater part of the more than fifty years which have passed since I voted for Horace Greeley for President of the United States, I lived in the modest home in the peaceful village of Ann Arbor. I am aware of the fact that in calling this justly famed seat of learning a village I shall bring upon myself the wrath of many of my highly esteemed and dearly beloved neighbors, but when I took up my residence in Ann Arbor in the seventies it was certainly only a village and since, unlike many American cities, it has not had a phenomenal growth, I still prefer to call it a village and I linger over this designation most lovingly. It was never a Gopher Prairie, as described by the talented author of Main Street, but for the most part at least it has consisted of a collection of modest homes in which has dwelled an appreciation of learning. However it is not my purpose, now at least, to do more than indicate that my neighbors have been interesting and intelligent; in other words, my environment has been good.

I have been fortunate in my neighbors and friends. My own position has been that of teacher in a limited branch of chemistry and hygiene. As I have told elsewhere, for some twenty years medicine among my students, colleagues and neighbors, so far as they were willing to trust their bodily ailments to my professional skill. Many years ago I discontinued my medical practice, and a colleague has on more than one occasion called my attention to the fact that the local death rate has fallen since that time. This I freely admit, but would be willing to combat any claim that there is causal relation between the two facts.

In this peaceful village, somewhat removed from the great throbbing world, I have spent a quiet life. My name has occasionally appeared in print on the program of some scientific meeting but never in the society columns or among the celebrities. Financially I have sailed only in quiet waters and should have escaped all sharks, but the reminiscences which I am about to relate will furnish other and more detailed information on this point.

It was when our respected, martyred President McKinley and his invalid wife occupied the White House that the experience now to be related occurred. The month was February, when old Boreas is likely to be most dominant in Michigan; the sun had appeared above the horizon accompanied by his dogs, seen only when the mercury falls far below zero. The day had grown colder with each hour and the north wind cut the face of the wayfarer like the lash of a heavy whip. During the forenoon I had seen a few patients in the office, lectured to my big class in hygiene, and struggled through the deep snowdrifts to visit the homes of my more seriously ill patients.

During the afternoon I had worked in my laboratory among my rabbits and guinea pigs, in my attempts to solve some of the many problems concerning the nature and processes of infection. Usually I saw some of my students or patients in my library after supper, but this evening the cold was so intense, the walks so deep in snow and the wind so biting that I expected no one and anticipated keen enjoyment in the study of a ponderous tome lately arrived from Europe. To the student there is no joy quite comparable to that of feeling sure that he is to have a few hours, unbroken by the coming of even his best friend, to give to the perusal of some interesting volume. Saturated with this sense of pure contentment, thankful for the raging storm without for bringing me the highly prized opportunity, I exchanged my coat for a somewhat worn smoking jacket, my damp shoes for soft slippers and with a good cigar I drew my great chair in front of the grate of glowing cannel coal and thanked the storm gods for the howling night.

The volume eagerly expected for months and lately arrived, was the complete works of a peripatetic doctor of the early part of the sixteenth century who wrote under the euphonious name of Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus. In view of what happened to me that evening I may mention the fact that this author was a Swiss and that the city in which he began his work, Basel, after having pronounced him a sorcerer, a corrupter of morals and one possessed by the devil, after driving him beyond its walls in his lifetime, has recently placed on one of its public squares a handsome monument in his memory and now proudly claims to be his native city. Among the heresies of which he was accused was the teaching that at least some of the processes going on in the human body are chemical; that the efficiency of certain drugs, like opium, might be improved by the extraction and utilization of their active principles; that miners in the Tyrol were poisoned with the vapors of arsenic and antimony; that syphilis, then recently introduced into Europe, is a venereal disease and might be cured by mercury; that the children of goitrous parents are likely to be cretins (fools); that without air all living things would die from suffocation. These were some of his professional heresies, but his immoral teachings were worse. He went so far as to say, “He who is able to be his own master should not allow himself to be led blindly by another.” The chapter which I had promised myself the pleasure of reading that night is entitled De Generatione Stultorum (The Begetting of Fools). My promised hours of pleasure were abbreviated to a few minutes. I had not read more than two or three pages when I heard the storm house door open and close. Someone in the vestibule was stamping the snow from his feet. “Alas!” I thought. “Someone is dying or a child is to be born. In either case I am called upon to officiate. The population of this village will be decreased or increased by one before morning. Nothing else could drive man, woman or child out into this storm.”

Before these cogitations had been fairly registered on my brain cells the doorbell had sounded and I had admitted to my study a most interesting stranger. At my bidding he was laying aside his overcoat, which evidently was of costly fur, and removing his heavy arctics. Then he stood in the glow of the grate fire, the most prepossessing man it has ever been my lot to meet.

During these seconds I was only a self interrogation point. “Who is he?” On entering the room he had asked: “Have I the honor of meeting Professor Vaughan?” The form of the question, its intonation, the accompanying smile and the graceful inclination of the body, all were complimentary to the person addressed. I l admit that the subtle flattery, expressed in manner more I artistically than in words, quite captivated me, unsophisticated as I was. The question, “Who is he ?” I did not cease knocking at every cell in my conscious being. His English was faultless, and he had pronounced my name correctly, as no Frenchman or German could have done. No Englishman, so far as I have observed, could have been so graceful in bearing or so felicitous in speech. These hasty mental notes led me to the conclusion that my visitor was a fellow countryman of a variety with which I had but little acquaintance. We of the Middle West had heard much of the superiority of Harvard graduates, but there were several of these on my own Faculty, and once or twice I had ventured out in the world as far as Boston, where I had met members of the Harvard Faculties on their native heath, and I had concluded that there is among them no pretension to superior culture. They are, it is true, a fine type of the American, but with insufficient differentiation in speech or manner from the common stock to justify their classification as a new species or even as a new variety. That my visitor could be a medical confrere from one of our great cities-New York, Philadelphia, Chicago-I did not entertain for a moment, because these have acquired from their environment a directness in speech and manner which has been no small factor in making them quite equal in skill and accomplishment to the medical practitioners and professors of Europe.

With my question as to his identity still unanswered, my visitor, after warming his hands and after making a few desultory remarks concerning the inclemency of the night, addressed me as follows: “I have come from Geneva, Switzerland, and I bring you an important message from the great scientist, Pictet.”

With this statement he handed me an unsealed letter. On the envelope and on the letter sheet, these words in French were engraved: “Laboratory of Professor Raoul Pictet, Geneva, Switzerland.” The letter was in French and I admit that I had some difficulty in reading it. Although I was fairly familiar with scientific and medical French, I had had but little opportunity to read letters in this language and I was unacquainted with many French idioms. Moreover I could hardly believe that I was correctly interpreting the parts which seemed perfectly plain. The whole scientific world knew that at that time Professor Pictet was reducing many gases to the liquid state. Even the daily press had an occasional exaggerated account of the scientific wonders being wrought in his laboratory at Geneva.

The writer of the letter, as indicated by the signature affixed, was Professor Pictet, and I was informed that in his work he had mixed equal parts of sulphurous acid gas and carbonic acid gas and on reducing this mixture to liquid under pressure he had obtained, much to his surprise, a compound which had properties quite different from those of either component. The corrosive action of the sulphurous acid gas had wholly disappeared, while its germicidal action was greatly intensified. In other words, the experiment had resulted in the preparation of a marvelous compound, as bland as water but most deadly to microbic life. Under pressure it was a liquid, which passed into the gaseous state on opening the stop cock. The ideal and long-sought disinfectant had been discovered. In a hospital room or ward it would be necessary only to pipe the gas around the walls, and when disinfection was deemed necessary one or more stop cocks could be opened. The writer desired, so the letter stated, that a stock company should be formed in this country for the manufacture of this wonderful agent. The bearer of the letter to me was authorized to proceed to organize such a company, to sell stock, and I was requested in courteous terms to supply said bearer with a letter of endorsement. I fear that I finished deciphering that letter with incipient cranial enlargement. That Professor Pictet had ever heard of me and that he should have selected me among all the scientists of America to introduce his epoch-making discovery to the Western Hemisphere threatened to disturb my mental equilibrium, Fortunately my long scientific training saved me. I must have the evidence. I consented to make a test of the wonderful discovery and so informed my visitor. I had observed that he had brought with him a roll which he had carefully placed on the table. From this my friend-I had reached this degree of intimacy by this time-took a siphon bottle, such as I had first seen an English host use in the preparation of brandy and soda for his guests, and which more recently could be found on American bars. Pressing on the spring there was an outgush of gas which could be identified as sulphurous acid by the smell with no need of laboratory equipment in confirmation. On the strength of the letter and the odor of the gas my visitor insisted in a gentle but persuasive way that I should immediately write for him the endorsement requested by the Geneva scientist. He argued that promptness was desirable; that carefully graduated apparatus and skilled workmen would need to be imported from Switzerland, and that Professor Pictet was highly desirous that American production should follow as soon as possible.

At that time no shadow of a doubt in the authenticity of the letter or in the composition of the liquid crossed my mind, but I refused to give the endorsement because I had not made a complete examination. With training I could not have done otherwise. There was no moral question involved. A chemist could do naught else. My visitor sat with me for some hours, and, when not insisting on my giving-rim immediate endorsement, he talked most charmingly, not about himself, but about many places in Europe, both small and large. Some of these I had visited and I knew he was correct in his statements.

When the hands of the little clock on the mantel, a gift from a grateful patient, approached the hour of midnight, my visitor insisted on facing the storm and finding his way to the Cook House, then our most sumptuous hostelry, although I gladly and rather insistently offered him room, bed and breakfast in my home. Reluctantly he consented to leave the siphon and its precious contents with me, and it was arranged that he was to return a week later when I would be ready to report.

At the appointed hour he was again in my library. I told him that I had satisfied myself that the siphon contained liquid sulphurous acid, known long before the researches of Pictet; that I could find no evidence of the presence in the fluid of carbonic acid; that I had compared his preparation with liquid sulphurous acid which `~ had stood in my laboratory for some years, both chemically and as to their germicidal properties, and P that I could find nothing distinctive in his preparation. Sitting in front of the fire, he dropped his head with his ; chin clasped in his hands and for some minutes he was apparently absorbed in deep contemplation of the dancing flames. In his attitude and in his face, so far as I could see it, I could discover nothing but an honest attempt to solve the mystery. There was not the slightest indication of conscious guilt or intended deception. Suddenly he raised his head, turned his face all aglow with satisfaction towards me and spoke as follows: “I know just how it happened. I left Geneva in a great hurry. There was much confusion. Professor Pictet instructed his laboratory attendant to prepare my traveling bag and supply the proper siphon. The careless man picked up the wrong container. That is all there is to it. You can see that there could be no other rational explanation.

The next train from Chicago to New York passes Ann Arbor at 9:30. I shall go to the hotel, pack my belongings and take that train. This is Thursday. I shall reach New York to-morrow evening, catch a boat Saturday morning and go directly to Geneva. This is too bad! Such delay! Professor Pictet will be greatly vexed! Could you not give me the endorsement?’ Gently, but hi; positively, I said that I could not. With parting words containing much subtle flattery and with a smiling but disappointed face he went out of my house for the second f time without the coveted endorsement. I had a suspicion that the gentleman from Switzerland would not visit me again; therefore, I was surprised when on a beautiful spring day, when the maples that line the streets of our village, making its name so appropriate, were displaying to great advantage their i half-grown leaves, he entered my library. He came in with joy on his face and with words something like the following on his lips: “It was as I suspected; I left here on Thursday night, February 27; in New York I caught the Burgoyne on Saturday morning; reached Havre in ten days; traveled to Paris the same day and took the 6:1O Lyons express for Geneva that evening. Professor Pictet has sent you another letter. He approves of your caution and hopes that there will be no further delay. I brought the right siphon this time; it is in my trunk in New York and I will have it forwarded, if you insist, but I am sure that after reading the letter you will no longer hesitate to give the endorsement.”

I am somewhat reluctant to admit that at this juncture I lost my temper and spoke harsh words. I fear that I hurled upon my visitor insulting epithets. I told him that on a certain night, which, according to his story, he had spent in mid ocean, I had ridden on the same sleeping car with him from Grand Rapids to Detroit. I declined even to accept the letter. In short, I did what I should not have done. I became violent and abusive. On the contrary he showed no anger. He was simply hurt; there had been a grievous mistake. If I would only read the letter, all would be explained. I could not question the written statements of so eminent a man as Professor Pictet. The demon of anger dominated me and I rudely and harshly requested him to leave, and the gentleman from Switzerland passed out of my house for the third time and out of my life forever.

For years I looked for him on trains and in hotels. I did not forget him on my subsequent visits to Europe and other foreign lands. I wanted to apologize for my rudeness. I made inquiries for him, and I was told that he finally found permanent residence in a certain wellknown national asylum for the insane. Never since have I written a letter of recommendation or given approval of any scientific procedure without recalling my experience with the gentleman from Switzerland, and this has in more than one instance been the source of much humor. I must add a few words concerning the gentleman from Switzerland. He was an American of Irish descent, the most affable and persuasive variety of the genus homo. He had been educated partly in France, which no doubt contributed greatly to his skill in speech and grace in manner. He had probably stolen the engraved envelope and sheets of paper from the laboratory of Professor Pictet. He lied with great plausibility and occasionally gave attention to details. At the time of his visits to me one of my sons was in a French boarding school at Chateau de Lancy near Geneva. I probably informed my visitor of this fact, and this accounts for his taking the 6:1O Lyons express from Paris. This was the best train between these cities. I knew the time tables of the French road quite as well as I did those of the Michigan Central.

Some years after the occurrence of the instance here mentioned I observed in one of our large cities, high up on the wall of what appeared to be an old unoccupied warehouse, the following inscription in bold, black letters: “Pictet Germicidal Fluid.” Upon inquiry I was told that the gentleman from Switzerland had visited a chemist in that city and as a result of this visit had organized a stock company for the manufacture of the germicide, but that the existence of this corporation was cut short by legal procedures instituted in behalf of the interests of Professor Raoul Pictet of Geneva, Switzerland.

In the nineties there were in the village of Milan, about fifteen miles from Ann Arbor, four struggling churches of as many denominations, each with its pastor. It is needless to say that all these churches were cheap in construction, inadequately maintained, attracting but few to their services and paying the pastors niggardly salaries. The life of the pastor under these conditions could not be said to be highly stimulating in any material way. Three of these village parsons apparently felt the great responsibility placed upon them by the Lord, seemed content with the lot assigned them, and with the care of the souls of the flocks under their guidance. The fourth parson became restless, dissatisfied, and felt that he deserved a better assignment than the Lord had given him. He wanted to get out into the big world, meet more sinners, have a broader field for operation and possibly it occurred to him that he might be able to hold his own even in a game with sinners. He resigned his pastorale, went to New York City, to which he had frequently referred in his sermons as a modern Babylon, the home of all kinds of iniquities. Having reached the city and secured a room in one of its great hotels he visited the more important and well-known sugar importers. He bought small quantities of their best grades of sugar, took these to his room, prepared small white paper boxes lined with blue, giving especial attention to the lining of the top of the box which was hinged and so arranged by being attached to the bottom with a blue ribbon on each side that the top could not be taken off, and could not be raised beyond a certain desirable angle, which he determined experimentally with the greatest exactitude. The sugar in one of these little boxes with the blue lined cover raised to exactly the right position and with proper exposure to the light acquired a degree of whiteness unrecognizable in the same sugar not provided with the reflected light from a blue surface. With these samples he went back to the sugar importer, demonstrated to him the superior appearance of the sugar in the little box contrasted with the best the importer could show in his stock. The parson said that he had produced this superior grade of sugar by the discovery of an electric process of manufacture. He stated that by the application of his discovery crude brown sugar was converted into the product which he displayed in the blue lined boxes. The importer, admitting that he had never seen such sugar, became deeply interested. Within a few weeks a stock company for the manufacture of a high grade sugar by electricity was formed and the parson appointed as its general manager. He had no difficulty in selling stock in New York, but even this city became too small for the village parson. He sailed across the ocean and found the sugar importers of Liverpool quite as eager to invest in the electric process as were their brothers in New York. A large warehouse in Brooklyn was secured as a suitable factory. The parson insisted, and if I remember correctly, provided in the contract that the secret of manufacture should remain his and that not even a stockholder could, without his permission, enter the factory and acquaint himself with the machinery and its operation. Great hogsheads supposed to contain crude brown sugar were carted into the factory and lifted into an upper floor. From time to time the general manager invited the stockholders to a demonstration. Under his guidance they were shown through the plant, but shown only those things which he wished them to see and the use of which he explained. After a hurried tramp through the machinery room on the upper floor where they saw and examined the crude brown sugar, they were assembled below, the machinery was put in operation and soon small quantities of a high grade product trickled from a tiny spout into blue lined boxes. Each stockholder left the plant with a sample in his pocket and with visions of big dividends which would soon fill his coffers. This condition continued for nearly two years. During this time the parson had not wholly neglected his Michigan home. He still claimed residence, bought a desirable site in the outskirts of the village, erected a handsome house and drove about the country in a smart carriage drawn by a pair of handsome dappled grays. The stockholders became more and more impatient. More frequent demonstrations were demanded and less satisfaction found in the samples supplied them. Finally some of the stockholders actually grew unreasonable in their demands. Suit against the general manager of the company was begun. Finally the court ordered the general manager to throw open the manufacturing plant to the inspection of stockholders. When this was done its emptiness was revealed. All the brown sugar was found in the loft with a few boxes of Havemeyer’s best.

Then the parson was prosecuted for fraud and for getting money under false pretenses. My part in this prosecution was small but essential. I analyzed the sugar in the blue lined boxes and compared its chemical composition and its physical properties with those of the best market sugar and there was no difference. After a bold but futile attempt to escape, the village parson, who had valiantly gone out into the wicked world thinking that he might successfully play a game with sinners, was convicted and sentenced to a residence for a number of years in the imposing state hotel known as the Sing Sing Prison. His name, prominent for a short while among New York financiers and for a shorter time still more prominent in the proceedings of the criminal court, has not since, so far as I know, occupied a prominent place in the columns of the metropolitan dailies.

For three successive years in the late eighties and early nineties I gave a short course of special lectures in the University of Toronto. These lectures were, so far as I can judge after more than thirty years, of no special credit to the lecturer or benefit to the hearer. The invitation to give them supplied the opportunity for me to make the acquaintance of members of the Faculty and physicians in the city. I formed ties of strong friendship, many of which have been broken by death while others :t continue. Since that time I have gone to Toronto on at least two occasions; once to give the opening address for the medical school, and once to talk to the medical society. The latter event occurred in the late winter of 19T7, and that visit was a sad one for me. Nearly every friend made in the late eighties and early nineties had gone overseas to engage in war activities, had lost his own life, or had suffered the loss of a brother or son.

At the little dinner given me on the occasion of the 1917 visit, while I admired the courage of my friends about the table, I recognized that each carried a heavy burden of sorrow. The thing, however, which disturbed me most deeply was the attitude of my own country towards the World War. I felt sympathy for my friends who were still “carrying on,” but for myself and for my country I felt the deepest shame. In the following April our President relieved the nation of the sense of shame under which it was shuddering and called the people to arms. Anticipating this event, I was in Washington when the call came and enlisted as soon as possible. I had been in uniform but a few days when General Gorgas informed me that he wished to send a medical commission from our army to Canada in order that we might advise with Canadian medical officers, come to some arrangement concerning harmony and uniformity of action, visit the army camps and hospitals, and learn whatever we could that might aid us in our mobilization which was soon to follow. I asked that I might be made a member of the proposed commission. I desired to go to Canada in uniform. I thought that it was doing something to remove the stain which I had felt to be deeply implanted on my person and on my country. Within a few hours the commission, consisting of Colonel Goodwin (later surgeon general of the British army), Major Rist of the French army, Colonel Frederick Reynolds of our army, and myself were on our way to Canada. We visited Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, and Camps Borden and Cartier.

I must return to the time of my early visits to the University of Toronto. At that time the president of this university was Sir Daniel Wilson, a native of Edinburgh, the historian of that ancient city, and an archeologist of wide and deserved repute.

He did much for higher education in Ontario, and under his direction this university became the educational crown of the

province. Sir Daniel was known for the accuracy of his spoken and written word. Every morning the Faculty, including myself as a temporary member, assembled, donned our academic regalia, and proceeded to the chapel, where Sir Daniel read a chapter and pronounced prayer. One morning while disrobing, Sir Daniel’s attention was called by Professor Ellis, the learned professor of chemistry, to the fact that a quotation he had made in his prayer was to be found in the gospel according to St. Luke and not in that according to St. John, as Sir Daniel had accredited it. The New Testament was consulted and Sir Daniel, with some evident confusion, acknowledged his error. We thought nothing more of it. Imagine then our surprise when on the following morning Sir Daniel began his prayer: “Oh Lord, in the words of St. Luke, which in my petition to you of yesterday morning I erroneously attributed to St. John...”

In 1888 yellow fever appeared at Decatur, a village of some two thousand five hundred or three thousand souls in northern Alabama on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. There were not more than twelve cases and not more than three deaths, but at that time even a suspicion of yellow fever was sufficient to agitate and disturb the whole country. As soon as the disease was reported at Decatur, Doctor Jerome Cochrane, at that time state health officer, hastened to the stricken village. The Mayor of Decatur issued through the Associated Press an appeal for food and clothing. The state health officer, through the same agency, advised that no donations be shipped into the village. The reason for the advice of the health officer was that there was no one in Decatur suffering for food or clothing and that the shipment of these articles into the place would attract the ne’er-do-wells, tramps, and beggars from all the surrounding country. This proved to be true and before the first train of provisions and clothing had been unloaded the population of the village had doubled. Every worthless scamp, male and female, in northern Alabama and southern Tennessee, rushed to Decatur in order to participate in the distribution of the charities. The state health officer became highly unpopular among the inhabitants, both the old and new, both the permanent and transient, of the village. He cared with the best scientific information of the day for the sick and provided against the spread of infection, but when he appeared on the streets he was hissed and hooted. I believe he was burned in effigy, but no physical harm was done his person.

With the first killing frost the further spread of the disease discontinued. During the winter of 1888-89 the matter of epidemics of yellow fever in the South was discussed in Congress, and that body placed at the disposal of the President of the United States five millions of dollars for the purpose of preventing the reappearance of the disease in the South during the summer of 1889. The people of Decatur petitioned the President to burn and rebuild their village on the ground that the infection of the preceding summer was only hibernating for the time and with the oncoming of hot weather would awaken and manifest itself even more violently than in the previous season. In answer to this petition the President expressed his willingness to comply with the request to burn and rebuild the village, provided that a requisition to this effect was made by the Governor of Alabama. This placed a heavy burden upon the shoulders of the Governor who was besieged on every hand and by practically every interest in the state to make the requisition. Being in doubt as to what he should do, early in March, 1889, the Governor invited a few sanitarians to come to Montgomery, hear the evidence, and advise with him concerning the matter. I was fortunate enough to be one of those called to this conference.

The Commission met in the State House at Montgomery on a beautiful day in early March when peach trees were in blossom in Alabama. We were on historic ground; from the window of the room in which we sat Jefferson Davis had delivered his inaugural address as President of the Southern Confederacy. For nearly two days we listened to the impassioned oratory which comes. most voluminously and torrentially from southern lips, in favor of the requisition. An official of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad stated that his company would not await the oncoming of hot weather for the reappearance of yellow fever at Decatur but would proceed immediately i to change its line and leave the village twenty-five miles from the nearest station. Representatives of many southern cities joined in the plea that the Governor sign the requisition. The Mayor of Decatur in vivid colors pictured the distress caused by the epidemic of the preceding season. Then he turned the canvas and on the other side, in still more lurid tints, he portrayed the economic, physical and moral disaster which only awaited the revivifying influence of warm weather to burst the seeds in which it had been slumbering during the winter and send forth over the helpless people the miasmatic vapors which were to cut short many lives.

We had reached the middle of the afternoon of the second day of the hearing before the speakers in favor of the requisition had discharged their final appeal. The Governor occupied the chair and when there was nothing more to be said in favor of burning and rebuilding the village he called upon the state health officer for his opinion. Doctor Jerome Cochrane, a keen, alert, attractive man with gray hair and beard, for two hours, in a quiet conversational tone, reviewed briefly but clearly, the history of every invasion of the United States by the virus of yellow fever. It will be well to recall that at that time we had nothing more than theories concerning the cause or the transmission of this disease. Among us there sat Doctor Carlos Findlay of Havana, who had already suspected but had failed to convict the stegomyia as a distributor of the virus. For many years Findlay’s search kept him close to the great discovery which he lived to see Reed and his coadjutors make. As another member of our advisory board there was George M. Sternberg, who later contributed largely to our knowledge of this disease, not only by his own work but by sending Reed and his assistants, properly equipped, to Cuba to continue the search for this virus. To these men and to other members of the committee, Doctor Cochrane addressed his words. He argued that in every invasion of the United States by yellow fever the disease was arrested by the first frosts and that in no instance had the virus hibernated in this country. He therefore felt justified in saying with certainty that yellow fever would not appear in Decatur with the advent of summer unless reimported.

He concluded his remarks by turning to the Governor and saying: “Mr. Governor, you may have my resignation as state health officer this minute or whenever you wish it. But so long as I am health officer I shall not advise you to squander the money which would be unnecessarily and l’ unwisely expended in burning and rebuilding the village of Decatur.” As he said these words I saw about his head a halo. It is needless to add that the Conference terminated in advising the Governor by unanimous vote of its members that the requisition should not be made. Decatur was not burned and there has been no case of yellow fever l in the village since 1888. There was every personal inducement for Doctor Cochrane to ask the Governor to sign the requisition, but his scientific training and his expert knowledge of the epidemiology of yellow fever would not permit him to do so. This explains why in my mind’s eye I saw a halo about his head, as I recognized the fact that his words were determined by his scientific convictions and not by his personal interests.

The Columbian Exposition in Chicago was planned for 1892, but there were delays in preparation and the directors found themselves with weighty problems on their hands during that summer. In some of these I had a personal interest and some minor obligation. From the earliest conception of the Exposition I had been consulted concerning the safety of the water supply furnished by the city of Chicago upon which apparently the Exposition wholly relied. At that time there were thirty public and innumerable private sewers pouring their infected contents into the lake from which the water supply of the city was taken.

The London Lancet had caused of Chicago water to be sent to England where they were examined by a special commission appointed for that purpose and which reported the water badly contaminated. To-day we know that the methods of analysis employed by the Lancet Commission were faulty but no demonstration was necessary in order to show that Chicago’s water supply at that time was unsafe. In addition to the sewers of which I have spoken, other evidence of water contamination could be found in the high morbidity and mortality at that time among the inhabitants of Chicago from typhoid fever. I may add that before the Exposition was finally opened in 1893 a pipe line from a spring near Waukesha, Wisconsin, to the Fair grounds was laid; it having been decided that it was impossible within any reasonable time to secure otherwise a pure or a safe water for drinking purposes.

In the midsummer of 1892 I had fled from my laboratory to the north woods and was anticipating much pleasure and some relaxation in chasing the festive trout. I had been but a few days at my cottage at Old Mission and was enthusiastically preparing for a fishing excursion along the Rapid River when I had urgent telegrams from a friend, then a member of Congress, asking me to meet him at a certain hour at a certain hotel in a certain city. When I arrived I found an assembly of prominent men; some were high government officials; others were rich business men; and all were in a state of excitement. In addition to the Chicago water situation, Asiatic cholera had reached New York, had been denied admission, and was confined to a few transatlantic liners held in quarantine. One of the men present about whom the excitement seemed to center was a diamond merchant.

He had been to Amsterdam, as was his custom, to buy diamonds, and while in Europe he had fallen into the meshes of a French promoter. This gentleman had a recipe which was guaranteed to kill typhoid and cholera bacilli at long range and in unlimited numbers. The diamond merchant had signed a contract with the promoter in which he promised to pay one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for the recipe. There was, however, in the contract a provision that the germicide was to make good the claims for it, and I was called to make the test.

The proposition was that I was to improvise in the city where we were a small laboratory, that I should test the preparation, with a newspaper reporter nearby ready to send to an expectant world full confirmation of the discovery which was to free the Chicago water supply from its typhoid bacilli and to destroy valiantly any dangerous microbes that might be imported from India or elsewhere. I said that I could not make my tests under such conditions; that it would be necessary for me to take the fluid which the French promoter had prepared to my laboratory in Ann Arbor, mobilize my helpers, and that within two weeks I hoped to be able to make a report. I especially stipulated that during the two weeks I was not to be disturbed by any visitor or by any message. So far as visitors were concerned the arrangement was not violated, but I am compelled to say that telephone and telegraphic messages poured into my laboratory during the two weeks in great numbers. With the help of Doctors Novy, McClintock and others, I was able to complete the task within the time specified. The men with the French promoter arrived in a special car. Their intention was to form a stock company, manufacture the germicide, have it officially recognized and employed by national, state and municipal authorities. When the crowd came into my laboratory I had on tables in a large room four hundred demonstrations. These consisted of as many test tubes containing beef tea or other nutrient fluid to which the specific agent had been added in varying dilutions. Some tubes contained one part per thousand, others one part per hundred. Some contained similar preparations of well-known disinfectants, such as mercuric chlorid and carbolic acid. I explained how the results of the experiment could be interpreted. If there had been no bacterial growth or if the germicide added had a decidedly positive action, the contents of the tube would be found clear. The extent to which bacteria had grown in spite of the addition of the various agents could be estimated by the comparative, cloudiness of the contents of the tubes. The Raymond fluid, under which name the French promoter introduced his preparation, had some germicidal action, but this was not comparable with that exhibited by our ordinary disinfectants.

While others, most of whose faces showed keen disappointment, were inspecting the tubes, the Frenchman asked to have a few words with me in private. I took him to my study; here he became highly voluble. He spoke not only in words, but in gesticulations and muscular movements. He demanded to know how my demonstration could be true. Did I know that one of the ingredients of his fluid was mercuric chlorid? How then could it be less effective as a germicide than mercuric chlorid by itself? The truth is that Professor Raymond had overdone his attempt to make a perfect germicide. He had taken every chemical compound known to have any germicidal action and had mixed all these in his fluid. One had neutralized the other and the most powerful germicidal constituents had been rendered insoluble and were found in the deposit and not in the fluid.

The great corporation was not formed. Professor Raymond with his secretary and valet had a trip to the United States, lived at the expense of his would-be dupes and also at their expense returned to his native country, where it is to be hoped he acquired some knowledge of chemistry before he again attempted to prepare a universal germicide...