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So, what goes into writing biographical fiction?
In my June newsletter, I talked about archival research. Digging into a subject’s papers, especially personal correspondence, can help a writer “hear” the person’s voice, and can provide the interesting little facts that biographies often don’t mention. Excerpts from some of my protagonists’ letters are quoted in my novel.
But another way to find more obscure details to flesh out the life of a historical figure is to look for them in the media of the day. To start, newspapers.com is a great tool, despite its somewhat clunky search functions.
Early in Halsted’s career, working in a number of New York City hospitals, he was known as a bold innovator. (Maybe a bit too bold. There was no such thing as informed consent then.) He was also very sociable, enjoying a good party as much as the next guy. Friends from New York would have been surprised by his Baltimore self: much more serious, aloof, and sloooow in the operating room, in an era when good surgery was thought to be fast surgery. (One visiting surgeon watching him operate made a quip to the effect that it was the first time he ever saw the upper half of an incision heal before the lower end was closed.) But what were
those bold New York surgeries? How was young Halsted pushing the limits?
I found one example through newspapers.com - The Democratic Advocate (Westminster, Maryland) · 27 Jun 1885, Sat · Page 1 (see photo below)
Essentially, a woman suffered a severe crushing injury at her work as a laundress, which left her unable to use her right arm. Halsted’s solution was to replace the crushed muscle with a graft from a dog. (“At Bellvue hospital the dog was a mongrel and the patient a laundress.” Disturbing that the dog gets top billing.) The operation is described and success is reported. She was expected to be discharged “quite cured.” I very much doubt it. But it certainly was a bold thing to try.
By searching old newspapers, I was able to find mention of Halsted in unexpected places, rounding out the picture of the man. It was more difficult to locate Caroline, but she was there, if only rarely. Her uncle, General and then Senator Wade Hampton, was easy to find, giving me a picture of what her childhood must have been like. Most of this didn’t end up in the final version of the novel, but it shapes what did.
The two problems I encountered were: 1) Newspapers articles often got facts wrong, sometimes amusingly so — so don’t believe everything you read, and 2) It’s very easy to get distracted and spend so much time on research that you forget to write.
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