Jeffersonia

Jeffersonia letter

4th  November,  1863 – Penn State

My dearest Ada I am sorry I have not written you sooner.  I have sent several letters back to my wife and to the Government, but as you know it is the custom of the Tavern-keeper at Williamsburg who holds the mail contract to open them and read them for the entertainment of the common room, and given my current station I think there would be no bribe exorbitant enough to convince him to forego this tradition. 

Therefore, I had to wait until a courier was dispatched with some private letters for President Letcher, and then hand to pay the fellow handsomely to see to it that this would be delivered into the hand of your servant, not read for the elucidation of the crowd at Wetherburn’s Tavern.

I have sent you such gifts as were small and discreet.  I do not think that there are many other Gentlemen in Penn State, and I suspect it would not take too much supposition to establish who had sent you any gift which was truly ostentatious, and such supposition would be as good as fact.  I’ve no mistress here at the moment, I have been entirely too busy, and the local girls are either rather too eccentric or – for all of their education – too pedestrian for my tastes.

Education is a sore matter.  These people from what we must in some wise regard as “the future,” have benefit of a learning system which should by definition make the Board of William and Mary or the University of Virginia hang their heads in shame.

Yet they are not well educated. It is true they learn wonders of engineering in all of those Newcomen-styled devices which the rationalization of the physics deem cannot function in our sphere.  Yet not one of them has read Newton, though they call their maths Newtonian.  I have yet to find one of them who can read so much as a word of Greek, and the only one who can speak a smattering of Hebrew learned it at church because his family are Jews.  And that said I suspect that the good Rabbi Mordecai of the Beth Shalome in Richmond could put all of their learning into a cocked hat for never have I spoken with a man more read in the scriptures, or more long in the tongue. 

I have learned a great deal here.  I understand all the principles of liquid electricity and those general matters of mechanism absorbed them, and read them again, often quite painfully, because they have a disposal to display information upon what they deem a “screen.”

No doubt you have heard of these monstrosities in passing, but let me tell you the horror of them.  Take a magic lantern and cut out a set of letters from a stencil. Then stare not into the screen they are projected upon but into the scrim with the very source of light shining into your eyes.  Now, make these stencils surpassingly small, as fine as very intricate book printing.  But not very much less bright.  If you can imagine the headache that is induced by this continual bombardment of light upon the eyes.  I doubt it.  There are a few which are of better quality, and I am told that in fact they once learned how to make them in a much better fashion, but with the sundering, were thrown back upon their own resources and found this kind which relies on a simple process ultimately having to do with phosphorus to be easier to fabricate or re-manufacture locally.

I would complain that they do not print anything, but in fact I would concede they are short on trees.  We have our laws (and bitterly contested every year in the legislature – I heard from Dicken that there was talk of having to take the militia up to Fincastle County again to prevent some illicit logging there – that would do well for young Desmond, he might make Captain if there were a scrap of any meaningful size) as well on timbering, or else Manhattan would offer good enough money that every tree in the realm should be killed in a year and shipped to them to build with.  They get most of their wood from the New York to the north,

Speaking of that, I shall pass through Manhattan on my way back.  I shall arrange to take a shopping trip on Fifth Avenue, and as Gentlemen are somewhat more common in Manhattan, I trust I can send something anonymously without more than the raising of an eyebrow.

Fashions.  You would want to know what is in fashion here.  I can tell you that nothing is really in fashion.  As far as I can tell both women and men wear a stunning variety of clothes which have little sense of cohesion.  I can establish two things…

First there is a division between day-dress and evening dress.  In the matter of day dress, the men dress much as Negro fieldhands might in some small shirt and trousers.  In warm weather they dress in shorts which are little more than swaddling about the loins, making them resemble Arabs or some other heathenish folk more than civilized folk, or as you saw Negroes sometimes paraded about in, chained, before the institution of slavery was abolished. 

They are quite proud of this, and the women wear such things too, striding about as the naturals in the time of Captain Smith.  In cold weather they wear baggy flannel gear which resembles Zouave pants, but seldom wear full length coats for any reason.  They wear trousers to the floor without stockings, but of course that has been going on in the Capital since we made contact with Manhattan, and despite the sumptuary laws, which even I concur we are best without, having as virtually their only remaining clause that gentlemen must wear stockings in the Legislative chambers, the President himself came in shortly before I left wearing trousers, which I suppose was meant to send a signal that the Whigs shall have things their way.  I am as firm a Whig as might be, but I shall not dress like some Manhattan dandy!  We are gentleman.  But you will concede that trousers to the floor hardly raises an eyebrow, and the only reason not to wear such things is an attempt to preserve some sense of style, fashion, grace, and dignity.  To do otherwise suggests the Manhattanites are our betters.

So in the evening, the men wear suits with the jackets cut very short, like a Navy Jacket.  Otherwise they are plain and in drab tones, and they wear an invariable rather anemic cravat which looks more or less like an afterthought.

The women wear little, a fact about which I cannot complain.  I do not know if it is very decent, but I tend to take it in a neoclassical fashion, which is perhaps self-serving.  Many of them smoke, by the way, and are inordinately fond of good ‘baccy, though they needs must roll it into those little white tubes called “cigarettes” that you see creeping around the bad taverns down in Norfolk among sailors and other disreputable folk now.  I do not fancy they will ever catch on much at home, as the papers are expensive to produce, and the principal reason for the cigarette as far as I can tell is that it allows ‘baccy to go farther.  I experimented a bit with some plugs I brought from Orinoco, and eventually ran them through an electro-mechanical coffee grinder (which was noisy and rather frightening when one contemplated what it might do to an unprotected digit), but I was able to make some friends.  Now before you remonstrate, I said I had no mistress, not that I was living as a monk.

New York grows a tobacco much inferior to our own, and I have no doubt that we can get most anything we want for our imports.

Interestingly, the Medical doctors here at Penn State make a powerful case that Tobacco has ill effects on the body.  I read a great deal of their material, and while I have learned a very great deal which will improve my practice of medicine, I have ultimately come to two conclusions.  One that they are wrong about tobacco. This runs against my better judgment as a man of letters and sciences, however as a Virginian I must take that stand.  Second that they do not really know very much about leeches, and that their condemnation results largely from an exaggeration both of the advisable frequency of application, and the likelihood of contagion.  They have not in actual practice observed much leech-work.  I maintain that clear empiric evidence exists, and indeed some of their own writing concedes that this may be the case.

I am hoping to conduct experiments when I return to conclusively prove or disprove the germ theory of contagion.  While I realize it seldom makes the pages of the Ladies Bazaar  even you cannot be ignorant of the germ theory of disease, which has been pushed at us non-stop since we contacted Manhattan, and which has split our medical profession so bitterly.  I think it was foolish of Gregory to fight a pistol duel over the matter, but I believe at the root of it there was a woman involved, so that was at least the end of the matter there. There is no doubt that here in Penn State, diseases are a result of contamination by germs.

And there is equally no doubt that in our world there are animacules which can only be observed under the microscope.

The question becomes – in our realm, do they convey disease.  One theory would be that they do because they always have.  However, I would argue that well before I was born a steam engine of the Newcomen type was drawing water on the Eastern Seaboard of what was then the Colonies.  Yet despite the investment of over thirty thousand dollars, the engine built by Mr. Mahone has gone exactly nowhere, despite a certification from not one but three engineers imported from New York that it should in fact be operating. 

If steam does not propel a locomotive, because no great number of people have any faith that it will, even though it was a tried and true principle, documented in books and known by men of education, why then should germs convey disease?  If the universe gravitates toward whatever order of natural law is most facile, is not the vapor theory of contagion substantially more obvious and simple? 

There are some very wise doctors here, and I have had good conversations with Dr. Fleming, who is a gifted surgeon and also an aficionado of certain strong spirits, which he is not unwilling to share.  He agrees with me about the leeches, though he argues that they aren’t really necessary to his “modern” practice, but concedes that his medical theory has little empiric knowledge of them. 

Empiricism is a valuable thing in this day and time.  I hope before leaving to travel into the Empire of New York.  I’ve spoken to their Consul, and presented him with my traveling credentials,  and he has told me there is no reason I would not be given a visa, as I am a respectable Gentleman of no subversive tendencies.  I await really only the chance to go.  I had coffee (and not bad coffee as it came from New Orleans), with the young woman whom I hosted as my guest at home when she attended William and Mary, and she is most encouraging that the people of New York are profound empiricists (not my dear Imperialists, which ought to be obvious).

I hope this letter finds you well.  The most valuable thing I have sent to you is a phial of pills which are made from the mold Penicillium notatum, and which are called “anti-biotics.”  These are the miracle-pills which Horner had a year ago and claimed to cure Vice-President McDowell.  They are vanishing rare to get, because Manhattan doesn’t produce them, but is most definitely ravaged by the germ theory of contagion as it were, and so snaps them up as fast as they can be shipped from the Empire.  Penn State devotes its rather better resources to making smaller runs of high quality specialty medicines. 

Of course they may do nothing at all, but if we do have germ-contagion – which I do consider quite possible – they will cure almost any killing ill which should befall you.  Against the vapor it is absolutely beyond my ability to predict what good they might or might not do.  Still half a chance is better than none.  Thank God even in summer it is not so hot that Yellow Fever will go far. 

That is all I have time to write for now.  As always I look forward to your company though I shall not call upon you right away when I return.  I expect to be some weeks at Alexandria after I return through the gate, and I expect to be able to communicate and establish a more regular correspondence at that time.

Y’r Obd’t Sv’t

 Dr. Adam Fitzhugh

 

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