CAMBRIDGE ITSELF WAS fast becoming a new world by the early 1870s. It had been a quiet rural village, so quiet that John Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s brother, who lived on Appian Way, could say that when two cats crossed the street, all the neighbors rushed to their windows.1 Around the college yard and the Cambridge Common ran wooden fences, the split rails let into granite fence posts. In 1856 there were a dozen shops in Harvard Square. By 1863 a hundred horsecars a day traveled between Cambridge and Boston, running on iron rails in the middle of the streets, the rails set flush with the paving. Henry James Sr. walked along the car tracks when the sidewalks were covered with ice. The horsecar trip from Harvard Square to Charles Street, across the Charles River in Boston, took forty minutes.
By 1864 Charles Eliot Norton could say that “old Cambridge grows a little more like a city every day.”2 As soon as Harvard’s new young president Charles W. Eliot was installed in May 1869, Harvard became a construction site, with Thayer Hall going up in 1869, Weld Hall in 1870, and Matthews in 1871. Work on Memorial Hall began in the fall of 1870. Socially, there was something paradoxical about the town. Henry James wrote Grace Norton about “our dear, detestable, common Cambridge.” Henry Adams, newly appointed to Harvard this fall to teach history, noted wryly how “several score of the best educated, most agreeable and personally the most sociable people in America united in Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polar bear.” Cambridge society, said Adams, was a “faculty meeting without business.”3 William James at this same time also felt the “social dreariness,” the “selfconsciousness, suspicion, etc,” of Cambridge, but he could also ride to the defense of what he prized at other times as our “charmed circle.”
The real action at Harvard was not so much the new construction—though Eliot was to put up during his term thirty-five buildings, one more than had been erected in the preceding 233 years—but new appointments and a new liveliness to intellectual life. In 1868 Harvard was still a small, backward country college. It had a library of 168,000 volumes and an endowment of just over two million dollars. Tuition was one hundred dollars a year. There were five resident graduate students.
Eliot was adept at finding bright, mostly young people and persuading them to take academic positions. A number of appointments went to people in William James’s immediate circle of friends. Eliot, thinking no doubt of the English model, quickly instituted a series of “University Lectures,” intended as graduate-level instruction. Emerson was for the first time invited to teach at Harvard, to give a round of philosophy lectures together with Francis Bowen, John Fiske, Charles Sanders Peirce, James Elliot Cabot, Frederic Henry Hedge, and George Fisher. All accepted, and the University Lectures were duly offered starting in September 1869.
In February 1870 Wendell Holmes began teaching at Harvard Law School. In September of the same year, Henry Adams began teaching history at the college. This was the year Chauncey Wright taught a course in psychology. Among the most important of these innovations, as we have seen, was Eliot’s invitation, in April 1871, to Henry Bowditch to come back from Europe and join in the “great work” of reforming the medical school. When Bowditch returned from Germany in September 1871, he immediately set up the first physiology lab in America, in two rooms at the top of the old Grove Street medical building.
Nothing was more central to the revitalization of learning in the late nineteenth century than physiology, which was no longer synonymous with physics. By the early 1870s physiology was more interested in process and function than in descriptive classification and taxonomy. It was seen as “an acquaintance with the phenomena, the aggregate of which constitute life. It is the science of life.” Everything that in the twentieth century would be considered part of the life sciences was, in the 1870s, considered physiology.4 Two historians of Harvard Medical School later wrote that 1869 marked “the dawn of a revolution in medical ideas and medical training, based on the new work of Pasteur and the realization of the marvels revealed by the microscope, and on the physiological methods of study then in their infancy in France and Germany.”5
New beginnings, new horizons abounded. In April 1871 James Thayer rescued Emerson from his University Lectures, which had been much harder work and more of a strain than Emerson had anticipated. Thayer arranged for a six-week trip to California by private railroad car; Wilky James was one of the party. William spent much of the summer taking “sea baths” at Scarborough, Maine, staying with Mother, Father, Aunt Kate, Alice, and Bob at the Atlantic House, near Prout’s Neck. Many friends, among them the Bootts, the Sedgwicks, the Ashburners, and Wendell Holmes, were in the vicinity. William Dean Howells’s novel Their Wedding Journey and Henry James’s first novel, Watch and Ward, were both being serialized in the Atlantic beginning that summer of 1871. In March 1872 Wendell Holmes became engaged. He had gone to the Boston Athenaeum and borrowed Hobbes’s Leviathan again. On the way home he ran into Fanny Dixwell, asked her to marry him, and when she said yes, he turned around and took the book back to the Athenaeum. For the second time—fortunately for American law—Holmes’s life got in the way of his study of the dour and pessimistic Hobbes.
In the spring of 1872, James’s old teacher Jeffries Wyman decided to give up teaching comparative anatomy and physiology at Harvard. President Eliot seems to have approached Henry Bowditch about taking over Wyman’s post. But Bowditch, who had his medical school position and laboratory, suggested to James that he take over for Wyman, subject of course to Eliot’s approval. At this time James was working almost every day in Bowditch’s lab. Eliot quickly approved, and William James was appointed instructor in physiology in the college on August 3, 1872. It was a great opportunity. James’s acceptance of this appointment put him, in one small, seemingly irrelevant step, at the forefront of the all-important emerging field of physiology just when physiology and medicine (and even Harvard) were poised for the sudden jump to modernity.