Susan Ann Edson was one of America’s first female physicians, and had treated soldiers with devotion during the Civil War. Edson also tended to a president in the White House as he lay dying. It seems like the stuff of book length biographies. Why then isn’t she better known? A look at her life may provide some clues.

The Garfields’ Family Doctor

Edson was single, as were most 19^th century female physicians, and showed no interest in marrying. Her practice was largely devoted to caring for women, Mrs. Garfield and her family among her more notable patients in the capitol, where Garfield was serving as a congressman from Ohio and the minority leader of the Republicans. Four years before James Garfield and his wife entered the White House, Edson had cared for their son Neddy when he fell seriously ill.

Dr. Edson ministered faithfully to Neddy Garfield, but her efforts were ultimately not enough. When Garfield’s older sons came home from school they learned their brother lay dead on his bed. They were naturally afraid to go into Neddy’s room, but Garfield rose above his own grief to be the father they needed him to be.

Harry Garfield later recalled, “Papa finally persuaded us to go in with him. The great strong man was so sorrowful, and yet so loving that we almost felt that death must be something less horrible than we supposed.” (Peskin, 405)

Edson’s own sense of loss was all too visible. She cared deeply about the Garfields. Another family might have broken ties with the physician who had failed to heal their son, but the Garfields were not that sort. James and Lucretia shared their grief with the doctor they trusted implicitly.

Susan Edson was a practitioner of homeopathic medicine. Homeopathy, with its focus on less intrusive treatment, was attractive to women both as patients and practitioners. As an alternative approach to traditional medicine, which at the time still endorsed blood-letting among other practices, schools of homeopathy also allowed women to obtain medical degrees. Edson was one of the first to take advantage of this possibility. Many of this female physicians also endorsed women’s suffrage. Sadly, women’s presence in the profession further reduced the credibility of homeopathy among mainstream male physicians. But for those who believed in it, like the Garfields, such matters were irrelevant.

Susan Edson as White House Physician

James Garfield won the 1880 presidential election handily and Susan Edson suddenly found herself acting as the doctor of the President and the First Lady. Lucretia Garfield continued to depend on Edson for all of her medical needs. And Lucretia was rather frail and required such attention. Indeed, Edson became such a familiar figure before and after the White House that Abram, the Garfield’s youngest son, nine years old, had come up with a playful rhyme just for her. .

“Dr. Edson, full of Med’cin,” Abe would recite with a grin. The homeopath always returned his ready smile. (Millard, 155)

Early in May, the First Lady complained of a fever. Susan Edson was summoned to the White House. Mrs. Garfield’s maladies were not always serious, but this time her illness was of real concern.

“I’m afraid you’re suffering from malaria,” Edson informed the First Lady.

A Looming Threat

Back in March, mere weeks after Garfield’s swearing in, the Garfields held an open reception at the White House, a practice still not uncommon. Among the visitors was a failed politician named Charles Guiteau from New York, who claimed allegiance with the so-called Stalwart wing of the Republican party. Overly the last few weeks, he had repeatedly shown up at the White House seeking a position with the administration. On the only occasion that he’d actually met the president, he handed him a speech he’d written. He drew a line connecting his name with the written word, “Paris Consulship,” the position he sought. It would now only need wait. The consulship would soon be his.

Still, it never hurt to solidify his connections with the president. Upon meeting Mrs. Garfield, Guiteau told the First Lady he was “one of the men that made Mr. Garfield president,” though other than voting for the man, nothing could’ve been further from the truth. Mrs. Garfield, not yet ill, had nodded and chatted pleasantly with Guiteau, who found her manner natural and even charming. (Millard, 96-97)

None of those gathered that day knew this was the man that would soon be plotting to kill the president: not Garfield, his wife, or even Guiteau himself. The frustration of not obtaining the position Charles Guiteau felt was properly his, finally pushed him over the edge. Not much of a push was needed. Throughout his life, his family considered him mentally unhinged and some years earlier his sister had planned his commitment, but Guiteau had evaded her plans and continued on his own.

On May 18^th, Guiteau had a sudden, vivid thought. “If the president was out of the way everything would go better.” Convinced the idea was a message was from God, he grappled with its meaning and implications. For the good of himself, the Republican party and, indeed, the country, he would need to kill James Garfield. (Millard 56-57, 113).

Meanwhile, Lucretia had recovered sufficient strength for Dr. Edson to recommend that the First Lady go up to the New Jersey coast. Edson believe the sea air would be good for her continuing recovery. News of this development was released to the press.

John Guiteau, of course, followed the president’s every movement with rabid interest. He felt a train station would be a perfect location for an assassination and carefully placed his revolver in his pocket that morning. Garfield’s would be assassin followed the president and his wife to the Washington train station. But seeing Mrs. Garfield look so frail, he couldn’t add to her misery at just that moment.

“She clung so tenderly to the president’s arm,” Guiteau recalled, “that I did not have the heart to fire on him.” (Millard, 120)

Guiteau turned away. He had waited this long. He could afford to wait a few weeks longer.

Susan Edson and the President

Susan Edson paid frequent visits to the White House the rest of May and into June, carefully attending to Lucretia Garfield’s health and giving progress reports to the worried president.

There is no record of their conversations, but Garfield surely knew the outlines of Edson’s history that in so many ways paralleled his own. Both of them grew up in Cleveland. Susan was the youngest of four children, her father dying not long after she was born. Her older sister, Sarah, was just as fiercely independent as Susan was, divorcing her husband, which was simply not done, supporting her children by selling short stories and poetry.

For her part, Susan Edson never married at all. She attended the Cleveland Homeopathic College in 1854, by contemporary accounts only the seventh woman in the United States to obtain a medical degree.

Edson may have met her lifelong friend, Caroline Brown, at college, who sought a medical degree from the same institution. If not, they definitely did during the Civil War. Both women offered their services as nurses, as they were not allowed by the Surgeon General to act as doctors. Edson and Garfield may well have shared memories of the war, in which the president had begun as a lieutenant colonel and ended up a major general.

After the war, Edson and Brown moved to Washington together to establish their respective practices. Once there, Edson tirelessly worked alongside Brown and became president of the capital’s suffrage association. Garfield, for his part, was elected to Congress during the war and moved his family there around the same time Edson did.

Sometime after, Edson became their family physician.

Caroline Brown’s marriage to an artisan named Austin Winslow in 1866 (Winslow was then 43 years old) surely shifted the dynamic of her friendship with Edson but hardly slowed it. The new Mrs. Winslow—who had also worked as a journalist—joined Edson in writing a missive to Congress entitled The Right of Women to Vote. Along with Mary Walker, a rather well known cross-dressing physician, the two women had also planned the 1869 conference of the Universal Franchise Association, an organization advocating for women’s suffrage. Details as to the depth and nature of Edson and Winslow’s friendship are lacking, but the two women were often referenced together in contemporary suffrage accounts. (Harris, 112, 143; Stanton, Anthony, & Gage, v.3: 275, 295)

Did Garfield ever wonder about the sexuality of his unmarried friend, now 57 years of age? If there ever was a president from the era who might have, it was Garfield. One of his biographies reveals a rather intense friendship with another young man and in college, existing notes reveal a curiosity about pederasty. Garfield’s five children make it unlikely he was sexually interested in other men, but he was clearly aware such relationships existed. Garfield even enjoyed a casual acquaintance with Walt Whitman and his constant young companion, Peter Doyle.

Garfield would have seen how the two men looked at each other. Having considered the sexual possibilities between men, could he conceive of such activity between women? If he did, it didn’t matter. Garfield had a genuine affection for the physician he was happy to call his friend.

More than once they must have spoken of woman suffrage. Edson was too dedicated to the cause and Garfield too gregarious a fellow not to have done so. The president was sympathetic but not entirely convinced. Still, he sensed the time for some sort of action might be approaching.

“Laugh as we may,” he once opined with rhetorical flourish to a male audience, “put it aside as a jest if we will, keep it out of Congress and political campaigns, still the woman question is rising on our horizon larger than a man’s hand; and some solution ere long that question must find.” (Stanton, Anthony, & Gage, v.3/1075)

Garfield’s Shooting and its Aftermath

On July 2nd, Charles Guiteau finally followed through with his plan, once again tracking his movements based on newspaper accounts. He shot President Garfield twice from behind as Garfield walked with one of his cabinet members at the Washington train station, one bullet just grazing his arm, the other lodging in his lower back near his pancreas. A group of surgeons operated on the president, but were unable to find the bullet, their unsterilized fingers causing a poisoning of his blood in the weeks that followed.

Lucretia Garfield was in New Jersey at the time of his shooting, and Susan Edson had only recently returned to the capitol after attending to her care after a protracted illness. Edson’s brother and sister informed her of the shooting and the good doctor rushed to the White House. Later, she would write a touching if brief account of the days and weeks that followed.

When Garfield was brought to his room in the White House, he smiled in spite of his condition at the sight of his old friend.

“What will this do for Crete?” he asked Edson, worrying about the reaction of his wife, still recuperating in New Jersey. “Will it put her to bed again? I’d rather die. Go and send a telegram to her, saying I am at home and am as comfortable as possible under the circumstances.” (Edson, 612)

Edson nodded, trying not to let her worry show. Circumstances. That was certainly one word for it.

Thereafter the homeopath rarely left his side, serving as nurse rather than physician or surgeon. The men saw to that. But it was Edson that Garfield asked to stay with him. Both Garfield and his wife insisted.

“I felt that I not only cared for him in the ordinary capacity of a nurse,” Edson recalled, “but that he gained strength and vitality from. He frequently called upon me to soothe him to sleep.”

“Now I know why Crete likes to have you with her,” Garfield told the woman who rarely left his side. (Edson, 614)

A quiet intimacy emerged between the two of them. Edson would rub and then hold his legs, drawing them up and then pressing on the knees to help relieve his pain. On his better days, which were increasingly few, the president talked about the future with Edson.

“If the case comes up before me for a pardon,” Garfield mused, referring to Guiteau, “what ought I to do about it?”

Edson was stunned that the president would even consider the question, but that was the sort of man he was. “I doubt the people would tolerate it,” she replied simply. (Edson, 616)

On September 6^th, President Garfield requested that he be moved to New Jersey, where he could be close to the ocean that he loved. As Susan Edson watched him exit on a stretcher, waving weakly to the staff who gathered to see him off, she deemed the scene “the saddest I ever witnessed.” (Edson, 620)

Garfield made it safely to the ocean. He died there two weeks later.

Examining Susan Edson’s Legacy, or Lack of It

I find the interwoven stories of Susan Edson and James and Lucretia Garfield compelling.

So why has Edson not received more historical attention?

Edson’s 1880 portrait suggests that she could convey a stern demeanor, though around those she cared about, this readily melted away. Her unmarried status may have put off some contemporaries. Staunch suffragists were often viewed with suspicion, and Edson was definitely that. It was no accident that she counted Susan B. Anthony as a friend and ally.

Of course, the stories of notable women have until recently often suffered from neglect. It probably doesn’t help that Garfield served as president for less than a year. And the most compelling story of his presidency often has the male physicians who botched his treatment as their focus.

Final Years of Susan Edson and Caroline B. Winslow

Susan Edson never fully physically recovered from the strain of caring for the president nearly non-stop in the last months of his life. Nonetheless, her spirit was not to be dampened. With Caroline Winslow at her side, she continued her work with the District Woman Suffrage Association.

What Edson hadn’t anticipated was how she herself would be a victim of the unfair treatment women too often suffered in terms of what she was paid for the care she provided at the White House. She was deeply disturbed when Congress put forward a plan to pay her only half the amount a male homeopath physician was going to be paid for precisely the same nursing service to the president. Edson made every effort to directly appeal the decision, to little effect.

Edson and Winslow remained friends for the rest of their lives. There is a passing reference in an 1886 journal, Medical Era, to Winslow serving as President Chester Arthur’s physician, but I’ve been unable to find further details of that. It is an intriguing bookend to Edson’s presidential service if true. Winslow’s death in 1896 preceded Edson’s by only a year. Edson was 74. (Stanton, Anthony, & Gage, v.3/275)

Was Edson a lesbian as we understand the term today? There is, of course, no way of knowing for certain, but Edson and Winslow’s relationship surely deserves more attention. Winslow was married and Edson was not, but such designations may not be the most important in the final analysis. An undisputed truth is that Edson devoted her life to the medical care of women, the suffrage of women, and the close company of women. I’m not certain any other truth matters half as much.

This account of Susan Edson’s life is adapted from a work in progress, The Lavender White House: Queer Lives, American Presidents.

Mark Carlson-Ghost

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

References

Baker, Jean H. (2005). Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists. New York: Hill and Wang.

Cazalet, Sylvain (2002). History of homoeopathy biographies. Retrieved from http://www/homeoint.org/history/bio/w/winslowcb.htm on 9/12/2016.

Edson, C. A. (c1881). Supplementary chapter: The sickness and nursing of President Garfield with many interesting incidents never before given to the public. In Life of President Garfield, James S. Brisbin, primary author. Philadelphia: Hubbard, pp. 612-620.

Frank, Linda C. (2012). Our famous women, part 1. Retrieved from http://auburnpub.com/lifestyles/our-famous-women-part-i.html on 9/12/2016.

Harris, Sharon M. (2009). Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Millard, Candace (2011). Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. New York: Doubleday.

Peskin, Allan (1978). Garfield. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Anthony, Susan B.; & Gage, Matilda Joslyn. Eds. (1886).  History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3. Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony.

Winslow, Caroline Brown (1886). Women in medicine. Medical Era, 3/7, 206-207.