The Greater Journey

I have actually read quite a few books that I have not finished my notes for. They are beginning to pile up so I will try and get the notes finished for all of them. I have put my French lessons on hold for the moment.

David McCullough, “The Greater Journey: Americans In Paris” Simon & Schuster, 2011, 518 pp

McCullough begins his story in the 1830s, sketching the characters as they prepare to leave for their journeys to Paris- 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. In 1830 Paris' population of 800,000 was four times the size of New York City's and it was the most influential city in Europe.

Americans came to Paris mostly to further their education by the best educators in their fields of painting, medicine, and architecture at a cost they could afford. I particularly recommend this book for people acquainted with Paris. I kept my map of Paris by my side as I read so I could look up the streets and places mentioned.

A interesting section of the book deals with Elihu Washburne, American ambassador to France, who’s reports of the long siege of Paris in 1870-71, during the Franco-Prussian War, clearly describe the starvation and suffering endured by the people of Paris for a stupid war with no real purpose. Washburne stayed after the war and described the even more horrific atrocities of the Commune of 1871.

My Notes:
Pg. 10: The 1830s and ‘40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, as well as Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music.

Pg. 94: In 1832 at least 18,000 people died of cholera in Paris, none of them Americans. In New York the epidemic left 3,515 dead.

Pg. 115: Paris offered medical students two distinct advantages over students in the U.S. First, the 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.

The second great difference was in the supply of cadavers for dissection. In the U.S., 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, 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. In Paris there was not the least prejudice against dissections.

Pg. 133: Ether was first used in an operation in 1846 at the Massachusetts General Hospital administered by a dentist while the surgeon performed the operation.

Pg. 159: The first telegraph line was built with Congressional appropriation between Washington and Baltimore in 1844. (Morse got his idea for the telegraph and the code while studying painting in Paris—he was an accomplished painter).