Arriving home last night from our Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Amanda's aunt and uncle, in picturesque rural Cologne, Minnesota, we got the kids into bed and then watched in our own bed the last installment in the seven-part HBO miniseries on John Adams. My reaction to the first four parts is here. The last episode, concerning Adams's life in retirement after Jefferson's victory in the presidential election of 1800, is death-suffused: first his daughter, Nabby, of metastatic breast cancer; then his wife, Abigail, of typhoid fever (though I gleaned the cause of death from Wikipedia, not the show); and, finally, Jefferson, more friendly correspondent than political rival in these last years, and Adams himself, both on the Fourth of July of 1826, the fiftieth anniversay of the Declaration of Independence. Adams was 90; Jefferson, 83. I think the longest-lived people of the period died at around the same age they do today, but we lose fewer along the way.
Amanda commented that back then everyone seems to have died so peacefully. I reminded her of the scene, from one of the early episodes, wherein a naval patriot dies below deck during, or immediately after, a limb amputation performed without anesthetic. The preparations for the mastectomy performed upon the Adams' daughter, also without anesthetic, are likewise shown to viewers--the straps to hold her in place and the brutishly common looking tools with which the procedure was to be performed. The medical history is apparently accurate as it conforms with this grim report by Jim Olson, author of Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History. Nabby recovered from the surgery, but the cancer had not all been excised, and her painful death, about ten months after the operation, occurs off camera. Abigail took to her bed with depression and it was the ex-president who cared for his dying daughter in her last days. None of that is any part of the show, either. On the other hand, Jefferson on his last day is shown lying propped up in bed while being fanned by a slave. Sally Hemings is the third person in the room and it looks as if something could have happened were it not for the presence of the fellow with the fan.
As biography and political history there are innumerable inaccuracies, but the series is interesting in ways I hadn't anticipated. I've come to the end of this post without mentioning the Alien and Sedition Acts, which do not grab my attention in the same way as a woman having a diseased breast lopped off in an upstairs bedroom while biting down on a stick wrapped with cloth.
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