Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South

5. Swamp Fevers

5 Swamp Fevers Henry Clay lewis, physician and humorist, once stole a baby—a “dead nigger baby,”to use his exact terms.He did it because anatomy fascinated him, and he wanted his own specimen “to while away the tedious hours with” while he waited for dinner. He also stole it simply because it was there, lying in a morgue beside the body of its mother, and it called to him with a “bond of association” which, as he explained, “held me to my place, my gaze riveted upon it.” He became obsessed with the ghastly thing, so he wrapped it in a cloak, went to class, and “manfully . . . strove to be composed” until the lecture ended. Then he hurried home. This showed much daring, but his luck did not hold. lewis divided his affections between anatomy and lucy, a wealthy “Kentucky gal,” and it was often hard for him to keep the two passions separate,even while courting her. “When holding her soft hand in mine, and gazing into the star-lit ocean of her soul, i would wonder if there was not some peculiarity of her optic nerve which gave her eyes such brilliancy.” He was “daft” and he knew it, but lucy wrote all this behavior off as “the eccentricities of genius and love” and insisted on meeting him after class, which she did on this wintry day in louisville, despite lewis’s best efforts to avoid her. Complicating the already complicated situation was lucy’s father, who 83 84 Counterfeit Gentlemen had “an aversion to southerners” and regarded them in much the same way lewis regarded dogs (mean and vile). as lewis encountered lucy on the street,the father suddenly bore down upon them,whereupon lucy grabbed lewis and pulled him into a doorway to hide. There a bulldog (nothing else, given lewis’s prejudices, would do) tripped them both on the ice and sent lewis, lucy, and the dead baby all spilling out onto the sidewalk. “My cloak flew open as i fell, and the force of the fall bursting its envelope, out, in all its hideous realities, rolled the infernal imp of darkness upon the gaze of the laughing, but now horrified spectators.” lucy’s father hurried her away, and lewis never saw her again. He went back to school and ended up in exile as a “swamp doctor.”1 it probably never happened, but it could have; who knows? “stealing a Baby” is one story in lewis’s collection Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor, which is part humor, part horror, and part autobiography. The story contains most—not all—of the elements of a remarkable personal odyssey. There is the matter of lewis’s age and status : a young medical student slogging through the requisite training but loving his studies and the pure rationality of science to the point of madness . There is the concurrent promise of love and the aching loneliness for a woman, all complicated by lewis’s station as a southerner and a penniless student.There is lewis’s attraction to and fear of deformity (he thought himself ugly) and the hidden darkness within,symbolized by the dead black child and its improbable birth, or perhaps purging, in front of a mocking crowd.There is either blind luck or Calvinistic predestination in the convergence of that dog and that ice in that doorway at that moment .There is death itself, frightfully laid out for all to see. lewis, who fantasized about and feared his own death in terms that would have intrigued edgar allan Poe, was himself dead to the literary world for over a century. The real identity of “Madison tensas,” the swamp doctor of Odd Leaves,was in doubt and of little concern until John Q. anderson did the necessary research and brought lewis out of anonymity in 1962.2 Odd Leaves traveled a rocky road from the start, with its author dying at age twenty-five in a rain-swollen river only a few months after the book appeared. dying so young, lewis missed William Gilmore simms’s curt dismissal of his work in the Southern Quarterly Review (the only praise simms voiced was for the illustrator) and the general neglect that later afflicted the book. “one of a class to which we do not seriously incline,” simms wrote.3 a few stories have made their way into anthologies, but the volume still has not caught on, at least not the way...