The Most Beautiful Man in Existence: The Scandalous Life of Alexander Lesassier 9780812203165

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface: A Journal of Life
CHAPTER 1. Interest or Love
CHAPTER 2. Born to Misfortune
CHAPTER 3. Hot from Your Studies
CHAPTER 4. This Despicable Rock
CHAPTER 5. The Most Beautiful Man in Existence
CHAPTER 6. Tinsel of Military Reputation
CHAPTER 7. Soothing Hope of Speedy Promotion
CHAPTER 8. Arrived at Wealth and Dignity
CHAPTER 9. Thrown on the Wide World
CHAPTER 10. Appearances Are of Essential Consequence
CHAPTER 11. Consecutive Chain of Corroborative Evidence
CHAPTER 12. Compare What I Might Have Been with What I Am
Epilogue: One Series of Hardships and Privations
A Note on Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

The Most

Beautiful Man in Existence

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Vll

Preface: A Journal of Life

1

Interest or Love

2

Born to Misfortune

3)

Hot from Your Studies

4 5

This Despicable Rock

IX

13

26

40

The Most Beautiful Man in Existence

6

Tinsel of Military Reputation

7

Soothing Hope of Speedy Promotion

8

Arrived at Wealth and Dignity

9

Thrown on the Wide World

54

72

93

108

125

10

Appearances Are of Essential Consequence

11

Consecutive Chain of Corroborative Evidence

12

Compare What I Might Have Been with What I Am

141

161

Epilogue: One Series of Hardships and Privations

180

198

vi Contents

A Note on Sources Notes

205

Bibliography

241

Acknowledgments Index

203

251

250

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of Portugal and Spain

Illustrations follow page

74

140

The title page of Alexander Lesassier's novel, published anonymously. Alexander Hamilton. James Hamilton. Edinburgh medical school in 1815. Isaac Cruikshank, A Man Mid- Wife, 1793. Henry Heath, Physic, 1825. George Cruikshank, The Blue Devils, 1823. Engraving of the village doctor. George Cruikshank, The Examination ofa Young Surgeon. Dress uniform of an officer in Lesassier's regiment, the 42nd Foot (the Black Watch). The Serra d'Estrella mountain range in Portugal. Depiction of the Battle of Salamanca. Illustration from George James Guthrie's book on gunshot wounds. Thomas Rowlandson, Medical Dispatch, or Doctor Doubledose Killing Two Birds with One Stone.

viii Illustrations

Illustrations from James Hamilton, Collection ofEngravings, Designed to Facilitate the

Study ofMidwifery, 1798. Fashionable new mothers in Edinburgh, ca. 1796. Ladies and gentlemen of style promenading in Edinburgh. Lesassier's "castle of a house" at 57 Northumberland Street. Lady Louisa Kintore.

PREFACE

A Journal of Life

lin 1833 Catherine Jane Hamilton, nee Crokatt, returned from India to Edinburgh to seek a divorce from her husband, Alexander Lesassier Hamilton, M.D., then surgeon to the 41st Regiment. In Scotland a divorce could be obtained if the plaintiff could prove the defendant guilty of adultery, and it was the task of Catherine's solicitor, John Gibson, to obtain that proof. To assist Gibson, Catherine turned over to him a trunk containing her husband's personal papers, which he perused with close attention. Dr. Alexander Hamilton's agent tried in vain to retake possession of the trunk. Catherine won her suit, and then brought another action against her former husband, this time for aliment, or support, from the time she left him until the day the divorce was granted. Pending the outcome of this second legal action, the trunk was deposited in the library of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Catherine won this suit, too, but took no steps to pick up the trunk. Alexander died in 1839 without ever returning from India. The trunk remained in the library of the Royal College, dutifully listed in its catalogue of manuscripts but otherwise untouched, until 1987, when the newly appointed archivist, Joy Pitman, was given the task of turning the mass ofjournals, rolled-up letters, and family papers into a properly catalogued collection. At that point the story of Alexander Lesassier (as I will refer to him for most of the book), which started in its most literal sense two hundred years earlier, was once again made available. It is a remarkable story, told in fascinating detail: a passage from youth to maturity that is at the same time a window into the social history of Great Britain at the dawn of the modern era. It is not a conventional story of a Great Doctor, although some great doctors turn up in its pages; nor is it a unified narrative about early promise, continued industry, eventual success and perfect happiness in one's profession. Indeed, such a story would be anachronistic, for men of the early nineteenth century did not identify themselves wholly in terms of their occupations: confronted with the modern question "What do you do?" they would have been unable to give the modern brief answer. For Lesassier, the relevant question was not "What do you do?" but "Who are you?" He found his answers in novels, in his own sexuality, in social relations, and in warfare, as well as in his career of medicine. His journals, so carefully preserved in his trunk, were his great aids in this endeavor, and his process of self-construction, to use a modern literary term, continued throughout his life and was never entirely completed. "It is a

X

PREFACE

work of very great labour and difficulty," as James Boswell noted, "to keep a journal of life, occupied in various pursuits, mingled with concomitant speculations and reflections;' and we can see this work as the great unifying effort of Lesassier's life. The result is a richly detailed portrait of Lesassier's life and times, that much more engrossing because it deals with so many matters long considered vital to the shaping of the modern world. Lesassier was born in 1787 in Scotland, at a time crucial to the formation of the distinctive national identity of Great Britain. It is significant that his first professional engagement was as assistant surgeon in the Peninsular War, for the Napoleonic Wars were themselves important in forging modern British identity. So, too, was the ever expanding British presence in India and Afghanistan, and the First Afghan War, during which Lesassier died in 1839, is one of many markers of the growth of British colonial power. In following his life, therefore, we are also tracing Great Britain's path to the British Empire, and if Lesassier's path takes us through Portugal and Edinburgh, so too did a nation's evolution. There are other paths we can follow through history. Historians have debated the influences at work in the professionalization of medicine-the role of hospitals, medical schools, professional journals, and national licensing-as well as the way that professionalization has, in turn, influenced the conditions of medical education and practice. These discussions have usually assumed, rather than investigated, the personal characteristics of the practitioners involved. Whether professionalization is said to have started at the beginning of the eighteenth century or the end of the nineteenth-even whether the practitioners involved are male or female-all medical people are presented as "desirous of improvements in medicine;' to borrow a phrase from a London medical student, all ready to adopt the medical persona as the distinctive stamp of their identity, all possessing both the ability and inclination to take proper advantage of the newly formed hospitals, medical schools, journals, and licenses. And yet if we take seriously, as we must, the idea that institutional structures lead to professionalization, we must also take seriously the idea that without those structures, professionalization cannot take place, or can take place only partially, or by fits and starts. As Alexander Lesassier's story reveals, a medical persona was not easily acquired; only some of the vast number of traits a young man might have could be molded to accommodate it; and the recalcitrance of the human personality to fit that mold must be factored into all subsequent histories of medical professionalization. So too must the pervasiveness of romantic expression. Lesassier was not interested in the Romantic writers properly so called; there is no mention in his journals of Byron, Keats, or Shelley. He was, however, intensely interested in novels spanning the period from Fielding through Austen to Scott, and he actually wrote and published a romantic novel, Edward Neville. A penchant for reading oneself into romances, whether in books or on stage, has been traditionally ascribed to female readers and writers, but many men, too, longed to enliven the circumstances of their lives and turned to novels as naturally as we might turn to television. They also turned to the consumer culture that came to the forefront of social life after the Industrial Revolution. Historians have

A Journal of Life

Xl

sometimes assumed that the proliferating shop windows and, later in the century, department stores, were aimed at women, but Lesassier's diaries remind us that men, too, could be enthusiastic consumers of the new material culture. Yet if the story of Alexander Lesassier can be an illuminating guide to so many areas of human life, it can also be an exasperating tribute to the fact that historical actors are often completely unaware of what historians have labeled the main developments of their age, even those that affect them most directly. Historical biography is a dialogue between the life of its subject and his or her times. The generation to which Lesassier belonged came of age in the eighteenth century and had to adjust to the changing expectations in the nineteenth. Professional identity, nascent in 1780, was firmly established by 1840; the sexual mores of Tom Jones were under attack from the early Victorians; and though self-construction might take a lifetime it could not adapt, chameleon-like, to every change in social color. The first five chapters of this book trace the formation of Lesassier's character and prospects as a young gentleman on his way to making his fortune. The next three tell the story of his years as an army surgeon in the Peninsular War, where both his medical training and his personal characteristics contributed to his professional success. But success in one endeavor does not guarantee it in the next. The last four chapters in the book explore Lesassier's often rocky transition to civilian life. Marked by financial impropriety, racked with scandal, his years in private practice in Britain were also filled with the self-reflection that too often attends misfortune. For that reason, we may allow Lesassier the last word in his dialogue with his times. History is also a dialogue between historian and documents. In the case of Lesassier's journals the dialogue necessarily becomes more vociferous than usual, as the historian is moved to correct, protest, and sometimes expostulate with Lesassier's own view of events. Although he was often an accurate reporter, his interpretations were frequently unreliable, since his own self-centered perspective colored all his judgments. The few times he succeeded in presenting an almost impartial judgment on himself, the tone of the journal is markedly different, as though some other, more perspicacious Lesassier were speaking. This discrepancy between Lesassier's experiences and perceptions occurs even when he is discussing events in his own life, an area where, if anywhere, his authority might be granted: when he bemoans misfortune, the reader is aware of modest success in Lesassier's life, and where he envisions triumph the reader holds her breath at the inevitable disaster. "That is good advice! Follow it!" she wants to write in the margins, or, falling into Lesassier's own idiom, "What inexecrable folly!" in response to some of his worse ideas. This dialogue has prevented the book from being what it first intended, a sober academic monograph on medical education and professionalization, with Lesassier's journals culled for good quotes and telling anecdotes. Instead, the dialogue has become the reason for the story, as I have delved deeper and deeper into Lesassier's world to find out the reason for a construction of a self that seemed so natural to Lesassier, but seems so profoundly, obviously wrong-headed to the modern world.

XU

PREFACE

It must be admitted that the portrait of Lesassier presented in his journals and depicted in the following pages is not always pleasant. He was not an incompetent doctor, but neither was he an admirable one; he was in many respects a bad husband and irresponsible colleague; and though his personal and professional sins were quickly and thoroughly punished we may be as slow as his contemporaries to pardon them. But his faults are as revealing as his virtues, for both are indicative both of his times and his own life, and in any case a diary is unlikely to present a completely attractive picture, as Boswell's own diaries make clear. Young people of Lesassier's generation were taught to keep diaries as a moral exercise-"let me have the genuine sentiments of your hearts," said one teacher to her pupils-but what they and their preceptors were to do when the genuine sentiments conflicted with the ideal was never stated. Perhaps it is enough that both Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Gibbon show remorse for their own "errata;' in Franklin's phrase, once they have come to realize that they have acted badly, and Lesassier, too, was often very sorry for his own ill conduct. A modern novelist, Patrick O'Brian, has disclaimed the need to provide the reader with "wholly virtuous, evervictorious or necessarily immortal heroes," and surely a historian can be permitted the same license.

CHAPTER 1

Interest or Love

. JIn an unnamed town sometime in the 1790S, poor Mrs. Neville lay dying. Her husband had preceded her to the grave by some months, leaving her destitute; six of her children had died long since. All that remained to her was her young son Edward, who, too young to understand his mother's condition and his own plight, begged her for a crust of bread, promising to share it with his faithful dog. Her devoted servant, Nelly, was by her side, and so was the equally loyal friend of her late husband, Mr. Melburne: to them she imparted the highlights of her family history, which went on for some pages and cost her last breath. She was a daughter of a noble and wealthy family who had cast her off when she married a mere army officer. Her husband, incensed at their treatment, had gone to quite incredible lengths to prevent them from tracing her, even getting her to promise never to tell her son ofhis connections, or any member ofher family about her son. But her husband was now dead, and her poor child about to become an orphan; like Mrs. Blifil in Tom Jones, she had to confide Edward's true origins to someone who could assist him in the future. Yet though convention insisted that she demonstrate the strength of her maternal concern, it also dictated that her concern be thwarted, for if the hero was restored to his rightful position in society at once, he would undergo none of the trials and tribulations that made up the plot. Henry Fielding supplied the concern with the device of a deathbed confession, and the subterfuge that circumvented it with a letter purloined by the novel's villain. In the world of Edward Neville, though, the real villain was always Fate itself, and so in his case it is bad fortune that deprives the hero of his mother's last message. "'Nelly!' she called, 'give me a little water-How faint-& breathless-this has made me-The-name-would-havebeen-better,-but he-would-not-'... She feebly tried to swallow one other mouthful; but, in vain did she attempt to force the regurgitating fluid down ... then, muttering low, she faintly moved her pallid lips, & sunk, for ever, down-outstretched in death." We can blame this scene from the novel Edward Neville on Tom Jones. The two books are not comparable in literary quality, but novels like Tom Jones, Pamela, and Clarissa showed eighteenth-century readers that the lives of ordinary people could be fit subjects for a book, and inspired ordinary men and women to record the minutiae of their own lives in novelized form. In preparing to write Edward Neville; or, The Memoirs of

2

CHAPTER 1

an Orphan, the author, Alexander Lesassier Hamilton, adhered to the ideal of a novel drawn from its author's life, sketching copious notes and plans, a table of fictional characters and their counterparts in real life, a chronology of historical incidents correlated with the ages of the hero and heroine, as though he were writing a research project rather than a piece of fiction. He had an abundance of first-hand material, for he had been writing the story of his life ever since he began a journal at the age of sixteen. Indeed, he had sources previous to that: his own memories, letters from his father, his parents' marriage certificates, a page from his mother's Bible. And so even in the fictional Mrs. Neville's deathbed scene there is a kernel of hard fact. In Rochdale, in 1790, Christina Smith Hamilton Lesassier lay dying. She had been, if not cast out by her family, at least not rewarded for her choice of husband, and it is not unreasonable to think that her thoughts turned to the future of her young son, Alexander. Here, however, fact becomes more interesting than fiction, for instead of dying without revealing Alexander's family connections, she had carefully written the names and birth dates of her entire family in her Bible, including the particulars of her marriage three years before. The birth of her only child, Alexander, ((September 12 1787 Afternoon 3.oclock," is the last event recorded in her own hand. It was left to someone else to complete the family record with the note "Christina Smith Le Sassier spouse of Peter Le Sassier, M:D: & mother of Alexander Le Sassier died in the town of Rochdale Lancashire on the 9th of Jan 1790 in the 20th year of her age, three months, & 20 days." Christina's relatives were not noble, but their names were worth writing down, for she came from a distinguished medical family in the preeminently medical city of Edinburgh. She was born on 20 September 1769, the second child and eldest daughter of Alexander and Catherine Reid Hamilton. Her father was the founder of the family's medical fortunes, "toiling, for years, among the lower classes, without receiving any thing," but eventually building up an extensive practice. His membership in the College of Surgeons gave him access to the lucrative monopoly on surgery held by the College. His marriage to Catherine Reid, daughter of a prosperous merchant, advanced both his fortune and his interest, and in 1780 he was appointed Professor of Midwifery in the University of Edinburgh. Midwifery was a recent addition to the university curriculum, and the male midwife, like Dr. Slop in Tristram Shandy, was still a figure of derision in some circles, but Alexander Hamilton, blunt and energetic, author of the well-regarded Treatise on Midwifery, did much to make it respectable. By the 1790S he had become the most sought-after obstetrician in Edinburgh and the father of ten children. It was a good family for a medical man, and so it must have appeared to Pierre Lesassier when he arrived at Edinburgh University to take courses in 1782. He was born in 1756 in St.-Crespin-aux-Bois, France, to Marie Anne Caucher and Pierre LeSassier, a surgeon. Toward the end of his life he would claim to be the illegitimate son of the Count de Rochepaliere, an officer of the Gardes de Corps, in which his putative father served as assistant surgeon during the Seven Years War. But Alexander later noted sadly, "My father's inexplicable mystery on the subject of his early life ... renders it utterly vain to expect I should ever be able to arrive at a consistent, or even a credible,

Interest or Love

3

conclusion;' and we must conclude that the story of noble paternity was as much a fiction as Mrs. Neville's death, with a similar kernel of fact: Pierre was born one month after his parents' marriage. He spent his early childhood with his maternal grandparents. His father returned to set up practice in Paris in 1762, and Pierre joined him, but "there was a coolness between my father and mother;' Pierre later wrote, and she remained with her parents. Pierre himself received an excellent preliminary education, studying anatomy with Sabatier, botany with Jussieu, chemistry with Fourcroy, and natural history with Daubenton, all of them leading lights of the profession. He could have stayed in France and become one himself, or so he later claimed, but he found he "was perfectly disgusted with Paris and could foresee that there something was rotten in the kingdom of France (not in Danemark)." His travels were unusually extensive: between 1777 and 1780 he went to the Netherlands, then through France to Germany and Pavia, then to England, Ireland, and Wales, then to London, and back to France, to Strasbourg. From 1780 to 1782 he studied anatomy at Trinity College, Dublin; from 1782 to 1784 he studied in Edinburgh; in 1785 he returned to France to study surgery in Paris, and in 1786 he returned once again to Edinburgh. This is not quite the usual pattern of the medical Grand Tour. Pierre's travels have, indeed, an aimless quality about them, suggesting that Pierre was seeking not merely "medical improvement;' to use the contemporary phrase, but rather a promising place to set up practice. Judging from his itinerary, he had in mind a flourishing university town, with opportunities for study and pleasure, and a good supply of paying patients. But a good location was not enough by itself. As Jane Austen's contemporaries would have hastened to assert, a beginning medical practitioner without money or family must be in want of a wife. Pierre's own philosophy was "by all means to marry as soon as circumstances would permit-But not to chuse a wife entirely for either interest or love." As he later told his son, "Let there be affection ... but there must also be either money or connections." Pierre Lesassier, thirty years old when he arrived in Edinburgh, may have felt he had found all three in Christina Hamilton, nearly seventeen in the summer of 1786. He might have met her when taking courses with her father two years before. He was one of dozens of students in Hamilton's lecture course seeking to acquire expertise in midwifery-an unrewarding branch of practice in itself, but useful in providing an entree into more lucrative family practice. After completing the first course, though, Pierre went on to become a private pupil, "by which he had frequent opportunities;' Alexander Hamilton wrote, "of witnessing along with me a great variety of extraordinary cases, & of performing delivery in many difficult & dangerous labors under my inspection, both in the Public Hospital & in private practice, which he did with the greatest success." Perhaps Alexander Hamilton invited his promising new pupil to dinner, where Pierre met Christina; or maybe Pierre took walks with her to Arthur's Seat or through the town, or called on her in the summer of 1786 when he returned from studying surgery in Paris to set up practice on his own. We can only guess at Christina's side of the courtship, for we have no documents from her beyond her leaf from the Bible and her signature on the marriage certificate.

4

CHAPTER 1

Her son, Alexander, had no memories of her and apparently never discussed her with his grandmother or aunts: his capsule description of Mrs. Neville, «Every thing that can render woman amiable;' is a tribute to his mother's memory but not a delineation of her character. She was almost seventeen when she was married, a susceptible age; perhaps she simply fell in love with the handsome Frenchman, a newcomer to her family circle. But the young woman who recorded names and dates so carefully may have had more on her mind than romance. At the time of her marriage Christina had four sisters and three brothers, all but one younger than herself; another brother was born three months later, and still another after her death. As the oldest daughter, Christina would have been her mother's chief assistant in her many pregnancies. Perhaps when she went for walks during the long summer evenings in 1786, her oldest sister only twelve and her mother pregnant again, she thought more and more frequently of the advantages of starting her own household. And who knew how many more opportunities she would have? Professors' unmarried daughters could be found in every assembly in Edinburgh, in part because so much money was spent on their brothers' education that little remained for dowries. Christina's sisters had merely the very moderate sums of £1,200 for their portions, and besides her, only Isabella, the beauty of the family, would ever marry; the others remained at home with their mother. Whether motivated by true love, or interest, or some combination of the two, Pierre and Christina were married in the fall. In Edward Neville, the hero's mother, «the eldest daughter of a titled family ... runs away with [his] father;' and the author's own mother did run away with his father to the nearby village of Musselburgh, where they were married on 1 September 1786. In Scotland, such marriages required neither parental consent nor a minister to be legally binding, and the border town of Gretna Green became notorious as the favored destination for eloping couples from England: «I am going to Gretna Green," wrote Lydia Bennet happily and unrepentantly when she ran away with Wickham in Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Neville, like Lydia, did not repent her rash action, but unlike her «is never forgiven; & no communication maintained between her & any branch of her family." We don't know whether Christina Hamilton Lesassier repented, but she certainly must have been pardoned by her parents, for she and Pierre went through a second, more respectable ceremony in the Hamiltons' church, the New Episcopal Chapel in Edinburgh, on 11 October 1786. Christina herself seems to have regarded the second marriage in her family's church as the real one: it is the one she recorded in her Bible. But Alexander and Catherine Hamilton must have disliked the match, or there would have been no need for the first marriage in Musselburgh. They may have had personal objections to Pierre. Handsome, perhaps charming, skillful, and well educated, he was also a foreigner with no money of his own, extravagant in his ideas, undisciplined, and in later life, at least, too fond of drink. They certainly would have had professional objections to him. A successful medical practice was a valuable piece

Interest or Love

5

of property, to be bought, sold, and passed on to their children. Like real property, a medical practice was seldom divided, but rather passed on to only one son, either the oldest or the most skillful. Other sons, even if educated as doctors, were established in practice elsewhere or joined the army or the East India Company. Unlike real property, medical practices were fragile things, requiring time and effort to build and maintain. It might take years to develop a practice capable of sustaining a gentlemanly style of life, and it might be ruined in an instant through no fault of the practitioner: by his premature death, by unlooked-for scandal, by the intrusion of a successful rival. Alexander Hamilton had brought up his eldest son, James, as his chosen successor; as capable as his father and far more polished, James's "natural & acquired abilities" were «astonishingly great-his suavity of manners unparalleled." But a later letter from Alexander indicates that his health "had for sometime before [the wedding] been precarious;' and his next-oldest brother was only ten years old. If James were to die, there would be no one to sustain the practice and support the family in case of Alexander's own death. Perhaps James's illness had played a role in Pierre's wooing of Christina; Pierre may have counted on becoming heir apparent to the professorship; and Christina, too, may have dreamed of being a professor's wife. Maybe even Alexander had considered the possibility when he made Pierre his private pupil and later his son-in-law. James Hamilton "entirely recovered his health;' and if Pierre had been seen as a logical successor, all at once he went from being a useful insurance policy to an unwanted rival. He was determined to practice midwifery in Edinburgh, and had "the word Accoucheur"-a more genteel term than male midwife-engraved on the door. He also taught women midwifery, in direct competition with the Hamiltons' own midwifery course for women. The Hamiltons responded, Pierre later wrote, by tormenting Christina to prevail on him to settle elsewhere. "Their view was selfish and narrow, in the extreame, to give it no worse name:' he said, «as there was room enough for the family practice." But the family practice, according to his new family, belonged first to Alexander and then to James Hamilton, "the idol of his aged father, the darling of his mother, and the hope of a large family and connections;' and they were not disposed to yield. In May 1787, his wife pregnant, Pierre applied for admission to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Fellows of the College had a traditional monopoly over the practice of surgery within the old medieval boundaries of Edinburgh, and were among the most influential group of medical men in the city. As sonin-law of a fellow, Lesassier could have gained admittance for a reduced fee; among other privileges, this would have allowed him to give public lectures, becoming an even more direct competitor to the Hamiltons. The College refused his petition, stating that "it was objected, that as the petitioner is a Foreigner, and no evidence is produced of his being naturalized, he cannot be taken upon trials." The minutes do not say who, precisely, objected, but Alexander Hamilton was one of the College's officers. With this failed attempt, Pierre acquiesced.