Knowlton Biography Chapter 9
Nine: Medical Lectures
Partridge had an iron constitution and did not suffer essentially in his health, but my digestive organs became very much disordered, I had an insatiable appetite for sour apples, much headache, and at length diabetes insipidus (I presume) to a very considerable extent. Nor was this all. For the first time in my life, so far as I know, I had a touch of scrofula…I meant to have added, before now, that Partridge and myself found that it cost us each about thirty cents per week for provisions. I did not derive more than half the benefit from this course of lectures that I should have done, had I been decently supplied with money and had hired comfortable boarding.
Charles Knowlton had been the odd boy of Templeton—he quickly became the odd young man of Hanover. Although he no longer believed he was dying, Charles still looked like a walking corpse. He was abnormally tall and skeletally thin. His face “bore the impress of grief, which it acquired during my sickness, and still retained a shade of sickly paleness.” A poor country-boy who really couldn’t afford medical school, Charles wore shabby homemade clothes while many of his classmates dressed in tailored suits. And he let his beard grow on his neck and under his chin, but trimmed his sideburns and shaved his face.
In addition to his strange clothes and grooming, Charles lacked the manners and social graces most of his fellow students took for granted. He was abrupt and impolite, and made no effort to meet his classmates. Charles spoke to no one except Partridge and a student named Sanbourn who shared a room with them. Sanbourn was a little better off, financially. He had brought his own bed instead of hiring one like Charles and Partridge did. Sanbourn moved out halfway through the term, apparently appalled by the poverty of his roommates. Rumors spread about the recluse from Massachusetts. Students drew cartoons of Knowlton, “profiles even more unseemly than my own,” and tossed them into his hat during lectures. The whole school, Charles said, “regarded me as a fool.”
But Charles wasn’t in Hanover to make friends. He kept to himself, ignored the smirks of the other students, and studied hard. One Saturday morning, Charles walked boldly into the lecture hall and took a seat in the front row. The room went silent, and then people began to whisper and point. Saturday was quiz day, and no one sat in the front row for fear of being called on. Sometimes a student who had already taken the lectures the previous year, and was back to review for his medical examinations, would sit close to the front and answer the professor’s questions. But never a first year student.
Charles’s classmates stared and laughed, supposing he really was a fool and didn’t know the trouble he was about to find himself in. Even the normally solemn Professor Oliver couldn’t help smiling slightly, when he saw Charles sitting alone in the front row. Voices were hushed again when Oliver turned to Charles and asked him to describe the structure and functions of the liver.
This was the opportunity Charles had been waiting for. He had not only read about the human liver, but unlike his classmates, Charles had cut one out of a corpse and examined it for himself. “I had a pretty full and distinct view of the subject,” he said, “and found no particular difficulty in expressing my ideas.” Professor Oliver was pleasantly surprised, and the students were shocked. Whatever they may have thought of his dress and manners, Charles’s fellow medical students respected knowledge, and Charles was clearly no fool. The teasing stopped, and when Charles shaved off his eccentric whiskers he became “as good a fellow as any of them during the remainder of the term—at least, in proportion to the money I had to spend.” Charles was still a poor boy from the country, who could not keep up with the drinking and “expensive revels” of his classmates.
Charles and Partridge, in fact, were probably the poorest students attending the Hanover lectures. “No two medical students in New England ever pinched themselves to the degree that Partridge and I did, that course of lectures,” Charles said. They lived near the Dartmouth campus, in a small room on the upper floor of a four-story brick building. Allowing themselves only thirty cents each to get through the week, the two men subsisted on beef, brown bread, and potatoes. The beef came from a nearby butcher, who saved them the cheapest scraps. Charles sometimes fried the meat, but more often he had to boil it for hours to make it edible. The brown bread started as a sack of wheat, which Charles and Partridge bought and carried to a local miller themselves. The miller kept some of the wheat in payment for the flour he ground, which Charles hired a neighbor to bake into loaves. When he described this period of his life years later, Charles spent much more time remembering the foods he and Partridge didn’t have than those they did. Their diet included no milk, no cheese, and “very little butter.” No fruits or vegetables, aside from a few sour apples. They couldn’t even afford tea or coffee.
It’s not surprising that a lifestyle consisting of long hours of study and this restricted diet took its toll on Charles’s health. Unlike Partridge, who wasn’t as severely affected, Charles was still recovering from three years of illness and had no physical reserves. He developed intense headaches and a condition called diabetes insipidus, in which his kidneys became unable to filter his blood and reabsorb water. The kidney failure gave Charles an uncontrollable thirst and caused excessive, frequent urination. As inconvenient and uncomfortable as the diabetes was, it wasn’t the worst of Charles’s problems—he also developed “a touch of scrofula.”
Scrofula is an acute form of tuberculosis that attacked the glands of Charles’s neck. His lymph nodes swelled, more or less painlessly, as the ulcerations progressed. Then the lesions near Charles’s right elbow and on the left side of his chest “became soft, were opened, and discharged the peculiar matter of scrofula.” Charles kept them bandaged, to reduce the mess and the smell. The infection lasted through the winter and spring, and the open sores finally closed and began to heal the following May, leaving Charles with lifelong scars.
Charles’s diabetes insipidus was relieved even more dramatically, when the professors threw a holiday banquet for their students at the end of the term. Charles attended the party and was confronted by a table overflowing with “cold meats, bread, biscuit, butter, cheese, fruits, cider, wines, and the various kinds of distilled spirits in common use.” It was fashionable for students to get “pretty well stimulated” at these events, and after three and a half months of quiet starvation Charles had a “craving appetite for every eatable and drinkable before me, and did not hesitate to indulge it.” Charles was barely able to get back home to his room under his own power, and he was violently sick before morning. But he was also cured.