'The Greater Journey' by David McCullough

THE GREATER JOURNEY: Americans in Paris,

by David McCullough. Simon & Schuster, 558 pp., $37.50.

Washington Post Book World Service

'Not all pioneers," writes David McCullough, "went west." Thus, he establishes his theme, the intellectual frontier mentality that drove countless Americans to brave the rigors of a sea voyage and an alien culture to imbibe the Old World charm and history of Paris. There they could write, paint, sculpt, compose, study medicine or indulge the other creative yearnings that propelled the multitude crowding this panoramic book.

McCullough begins his story in the 1830s, sketching the characters as they prepare to leave for their journeys -- novelist James Fenimore Cooper, portrait painter Samuel F.B. Morse, poet and medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes, women's education advocate Emma Willard and others. At the time, sea travel is fraught with risk. Only a determined band of adventurers (mostly young, mostly male) has the means and ambition to face it. Later, as the voyage becomes safer and less expensive, the cast enlarges. More women join the pilgrimage, including tireless medical student Elizabeth Blackwell, who later founded the New York Infirmary and College for Women, and art student Mary Cassatt.

A third of the way through the 19th century, Paris' population of 800,000 was four times the size of New York City's. A historic center of art, literature and medicine, it could lay claim to being the most influential city in Europe. McCullough provides glimpses of many lives, from Cooper, America's first writer to achieve huge popular success, to future senator and abolitionist Charles Sumner. Crusading novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe liked Paris because it seemed less utilitarian and Protestant than her homeland. "With all New England's earnestness and practical efficiency," she complained, "there is a long withering of the soul's more ethereal part -- a crushing out of the beautiful -- which is horrible."

For each American visitor to Paris, the recurring theme upon arrival is surprise at how much better everyday life seems there. "A dinner here does not oppress one," Cooper marveled. "The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures."

One of the many interesting characters is abolitionist and fugitive slave William Wells Brown. He faced death if he denounced slavery in his native Kentucky, but in Paris he was among 800 delegates to an international peace conference with Victor Hugo as its figurehead. At Hugo's request, Brown delivered a widely quoted speech about the need to "break . . . in pieces every yoke of bondage." He was feted at a reception hosted by none other than Alexis de Tocqueville, the French foreign minister.

"At home [Brown] could have been present at such a reception only as a servant," McCullough writes. "Curious to know more about him, Madame de Tocqueville asked him to sit beside her on the sofa. The only disapproving look he saw among the many watching was from the American consul, Robert Walsh."

McCullough's best scenes unfold in an extensive, detailed section on the surprising (and apparently largely forgotten) career of U.S. Ambassador Elihu Washburne. He became a witness to both the German siege of Paris in 1870 and the atrocities of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871. One of Washburne's onerous duties at the American Legation was to arrange safe passage for the 30,000 Germans evicted from Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. "There were women in various stages of pregnancy," McCullough writes. "One day a child was born on a bench outside near the door" of the legation. McCullough's plain-speaking tone is at its best in such scenes, which easily might have been overplayed.

By the time he shows us the triumphant Exposition Universelle in 1889, we share McCullough's enthusiasm for the city and his affection for the many Americans who improved their lives, their talent and their nation by drinking at the fountain that was Paris.

EXCERPT

"The Greater Journey" by David McCullough

In addition to the quality of the hospitals, the number of patients, the ability and eminence of the faculty, and the variety of instruction provided, medical training in Paris offered two further important advantages over medical training in the United States. Both had almost entirely to do with the difference in how people saw things in the two countries.

The first was that students making the rounds of the wards in the hospitals of Paris had ample opportunity to examine female patients as well as men. This was not the case in America, where most women would have preferred to die than have a physician -- a man -- examine their bodies. It was a "delicacy" nearly impossible to surmount, and as a consequence a great many American women did die, and young men in medical training in America seldom had any chance to study the female anatomy, other than in books.

In France this was not so. "The French woman, on the contrary, knows nothing at all of this queasy sensibility. She has no hesitation, not only to describe, but to permit her physician to see every complaint," wrote a Philadelphia surgeon named Augustus Gardner, who came to observe medical practice and training in Paris. "In this respect therefore the Paris educated physician enjoys superior advantages to the homebred man."

The second great difference was in the supply of cadavers for dissection. In the United States, because of state laws and public attitude, dead bodies for medical study were hard to obtain and consequently expensive. Until 1831, trade in dead bodies in Massachusetts had been illegal, which led numbers of medical students of earlier years, including Mason Warren's father, to become grave robbers. The new Massachusetts law permitted only the use of corpses buried at public expense, which meant mainly the bodies of those who died in prison. New York, too, had such a law and other states -- Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Illinois, Tennessee -- would follow. In the South it was the general attitude that, with the consent of the slave owner, the body of any slave could be dissected.

In Paris there was not the least prejudice against dissections. Even mortally ill patients in the hospitals, "aware of their fate," and knowing that two-thirds of the dead were carried off to the dissecting rooms, did not seem to mind. Beyond the hospitals, due in large part to the ravages of disease and poverty, cadavers were readily available and cheap -- about 6 francs for an adult, or $2.50, and still less for a child.

John Sanderson, after taking a room in the Latin Quarter, where he was "living a kind of student's life" near the hospitals, described seeing carts "arrive and dump a dozen or so of naked men and women, as you do a cord of wood upon the pavement," these to be distributed to the dissecting rooms.

Delivery time for corpses at the Amphithéâtre d'Anatomie, on the rue d'Orléans near the Hôpital de la Pitié, was at noon. Wendell Holmes wrote of how he and a Swiss student split the cost of their "subject" and by evening had "cut him into inch pieces." Thus could all parts of the human body -- nerves, muscles, organs, blood vessels, and bones -- be studied, and this, Holmes stressed, could hardly be done anywhere in the world but in Paris.

The size of the stone-floored amphitheater was such that 600 students could practice operations at the same time. The stench in the thick air was horrific. The visiting Philadelphia surgeon Augustus Gardner left a vivid description of the scene.

Here the assiduous student may be seen with his soiled blouse and his head bedecked with a fantastic cap. In one hand he holds a scalpel, in the other a treatise on anatomy. He carries in his mouth a cigar whose intoxicating fumes, so hurtful on most occasions, render him insensible to the smell of twenty bodies decomposing, putrefying around him. . . . Here, too, is the learned professor, who thus prepares himself for a difficult operation by refreshing his anatomy; and thus rehearses his part in the tragedy to be acted on the morrow. The blood and pieces of flesh upon the floor he regards as the sculptor does the fragments of marble lying round the unfinished statue.

Disposal of the discarded pieces was managed by feeding them to dogs kept in cages outside. In summer, dissecting was suspended, because in the heat the bodies decomposed too rapidly.

For all that was so morbidly unpleasant about work at the dissecting tables -- the stench, the smoke -- it was far better, every student came to appreciate, that they practice on the dead than on the living. If the work was laborious, they had chosen a laborious profession. For any of the Americans to have given up and gone home would have been easy enough, but there is no evidence any of them did.

From "The Greater Journey" by David McCullough. Copyright © 2011 by David McCullough. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc, NY.