On Monday, November 19, I typed The End at the bottom of the last page of the fourth book in The City of Dreams Series. (And if you want to know why I’ve waited so long to blog about it on this site – that was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and I had eleven guests coming for the holiday.)
Though I didn’t know it at the time, that Monday was also the 144th anniversary of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. (Found out by accident when there was a mention of it in a newspaper article.) The reason that’s a little spooky is that the book begins and ends a few hours after the guns of that terrible battle are silent, in a hospital tent pitched at Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. Where, as no one who is a fan of this series will be surprised to learn, one Dr. Nicholas Turner is doing what the Turners have been doing since Lucas Turner arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1661 in the first book of the series, City of Dreams; Nick Turner is pushing the art of surgery as far as the times will allow. And further.
Nineteenth century medicine plays a big part in this story, which takes place from 1834 to 1857 (the 1863 Gettysburg scenes are a bit of an added attraction that I promise will make sense when you read the book). The medical theme largely plays out at Bellevue Hospital, which was really, really scary back then (the mentally ill in cages, and a half-blind apothecary making what passed for medicine in a basement chamber of horrors). There is also a great conflict between religion and medicine, mostly centered on the subjects of anaesthesia and the truth (or not) of the germ theory of medicine. Plus, it wasn’t until 1857 that the medical faculty of the young New York University School of Medicine succeeded in getting the law rescinded which forbade the dissection of any cadaver other than that of a hanged criminal. Before then it was illegal to perform an autopsy on the grounds that it was an offense against God.
Other elements involving belief and non-belief burst new on the Manhattan stage in this same period. Evangelicalism challenged the supremacy of the more traditional Protestant denominations. And the single Jewish synagogue that had been founded at the time of Peter Stuyvesant became first two synagogues, then three. And by the end of the book there are thirteen, including the first Reform congregation, Temple Emanu-El. This is also the period when Catholic churches began growing like weeds in the cracks of the cobblestone streets, which stretched as far as the low 30’s by then. There were thirty-plus Catholic parishes in the 1850’s – mind you, there were over 300 Protestant churches - and in the 1830’s the first nuns were seen in the town. (Fascinating stuff – I’ll blog more about those first sisters some time soon.)
This bare-faced presence of “the papists among us” struck some as red hot evidence of sin, and one of the big bestsellers of the day was a book called Priests, Nuns, and the Confessional by someone named Maria Monk. What she had to say was exposed as the ramblings of a girl who had never been “right in the head,” as her mother put it, much less a nun, but the book kept selling anyway. So did another book that had a much greater effect on those turbulent times. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 100,000 copies in a matter of months, and there’s a probably apocryphal story that the first time Lincoln met her he said, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war…”
This book certainly won’t cause armed conflict, but I hope it will be thought provoking as well as enormously entertaining. You’ll be able to make up your own mind in less than a year. It will be at a bookstore near you in October 2008.
So what’s it called? DRUM ROLL!!! City of God, and that title was suggested by one of you, but I can’t find the e-mail so I can send him a bottle of champagne. Will this prescient gentleman who knew what I was writing about before I did myself please get in touch again.
Meanwhile, if you’ve been waiting for City of Glory in a snazzy new paperback version, it’s headed for the bookstores next week. “Riotously entertaining…” according to the Washington Post. Hope Santa thinks of it for some of those stockings.