THIRTY-TWO

The Emergence of Elizabeth Gossett

ELIZABETH RETURNED TO WASHINGTON, D.C., IN 1922. THERE SHE commenced life as a normal teenager, finishing high school and applying to college. During these two and a half years she had one major setback. In August of 1924 she returned to Morristown to be treated by Dr. Allen. To her dismay, this visit was reported to the world.

MISS ELIZABETH HUGHES ILL

Secretary of State’s

Daughter Suffers Diabetes Attack

MISS HUGHES IMPROVING

It Is Not Known How

Long She Will Remain in Sanitarium

In 1925 Elizabeth moved to her beloved New York City to attend Barnard College. From then until she graduated in 1929, Elizabeth pursued her dream of normalcy by living as any other Barnard student would—studying, dating, and enjoying the city. She even tempted fate with the occasional cocktail and cigarette. She told no one of her condition. In 1926 she weighed 150 pounds and took 38 units of insulin per day, which she administered herself, sharpening her own needle on a whetstone. Per special arrangement with Banting, her insulin—sometimes five thousand units at a time—was shipped directly from Connaught to “Miss E. E. Hughes, c/o State Department, Washington, D.C.” She did not see a doctor once during these four years. She did not keep in touch with Banting or her Toronto cohort or Blanche. When her name did appear in print, it was unrelated to diabetes. She organized a club of Barnard undergraduates to support Hoover’s presidential campaign and debated James Roosevelt, second son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on a bipartisan radio program. During the summers she often traveled with her parents to Europe, circulating among the most notable political and public figures of the day. She became a familiar face at The Hague, where her father served as a judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice from 1928 to 1930. The three of them continued to honor their agreement to forget the diabetic past, and soon the anguish of her life before Toronto seemed like a distant dream.

In 1928 Charles Evans Hughes hired a research assistant named William T. Gossett who was fresh out of law school. Like Hughes himself, Gossett worked his way through Columbia University Law School. In a further parallel to Hughes’s life trajectory, Gossett became an associate at a law firm (Hughes, Rounds, Schurman and Dwight, now Hughes, Hubbard & Reed), and became engaged to his boss’s daughter. Elizabeth did not tell Bill of her diabetes until a week after their engagement. Elizabeth and Bill were married in 1930, opting for a quiet ceremony at home, just as Antoinette and Charles had. Neither Banting nor Allen nor Blanche was invited to the wedding. Among the most beautiful of the wedding gifts was a pair of exquisitely wrought silver urns on pedestals given by President and Mrs. Herbert Hoover. Her willful amnesia about her illness was so complete that Elizabeth Gossett spent her honeymoon in Bermuda, where Elizabeth Hughes had suffered the very nadir of her four-year starvation.

In 1930, Charles Evans Hughes became chief justice of the United States after a two-week Senate debate on his suitability for the role, given his prolonged association with big business clients (e.g., Standard Oil). In eleven years as chief justice he administered the oath of office to President Franklin D. Roosevelt three times. It was to FDR that he submitted his letter of resignation in 1941. He was so concerned that his decision might be leaked to the press that he didn’t tell his own children. They learned of his retirement by reading about it in the newspaper.

During the 1930s, Hughes became aware of the emerging trend among biographers, attributed largely to the British writer and critic Lytton Strachey, of irreverent portrayal in the guise of psychological insight and analysis. He may have been impressed also with Sir Frederick Banting’s swift and decisive postdivorce humiliation in the popular press. To preempt the field and avoid becoming the target of an unflattering literary effort, the chief justice conceived the idea of composing an authoritative document that would set down the events of his life and career as he saw them and, more important, as he wanted them to be seen.

In 1933 Henry Beerits, a Princeton student majoring in politics, wrote his senior thesis about Charles Evans Hughes. His thesis advisor, Professor Edwin S. Corwin, an authority on constitutional law, proposed that the young man send a copy of the paper to Hughes himself. Just ten days later, Beerits received a reply from the chief justice. The letter thanked him for the paper and said that both he and Mrs. Hughes had read it and been impressed by it. Further, Hughes suggested that if Henry had no definite plans for the coming year, he might consider coming to Washington to work on a project with the chief justice. The project to which Hughes referred was the compilation of his autobiographical notes, which became known as the Beerits Memoranda.

Beerits arrived in Washington in September and would remain there, living at the Racquet Club and working on the memoranda until May. Hughes asked Beerits not to discuss the project with others. In an article published in 1992 entitled “Aftermath of a Senior Thesis” for the Princeton Class of ‘33 newsletter, Beerits described their process:

Every Sunday afternoon I would go to his home, where he had a study on the ground floor, and he would reminisce about a stage of his career, referring me to various relevant books and articles. I would take careful notes and during the coming week, in my office at the Library of Congress, I would write a detailed account of his topic, with plenty offootnotes. On the next Sunday, at the beginning of our session, he would review this account and comment on it. It would be about 35 typewritten pages, and he would turn from one page to the next quickly with only a brief look, and I would think that my very careful presentation was not being appreciated. And then he would comment that a particular word was a bit strong, and it was apparent that he was taking in everything on the page. He had this ability to fully absorb a whole page at a glance, and furthermore he had a photographic memory that would recall all that he read.

A highlight of the year was Beerits’s being included in a very special dinner at the long stately table in the formal dining room with Elizabeth Gossett and her husband, Bill. Elizabeth was extremely interested in the young man and his project. After all, it had once been her fervent ambition to write her father’s biography. Like her father, she knew that, victors and vanquished aside, history is written by the writers—and writers employ erasers as well as words.

In a final attempt to shape the record, Hughes composed “Autobiographical Notes” between November 1941 and the end of 1945, drawing heavily upon the Beerits Memoranda. Among the thousands of pages of these documents, there is no mention of diabetes or of Elizabeth’s long struggle or of Banting. Having crossed the line, he was now redrawing it. He and Elizabeth were bound by blood and silence.

There were two things that Elizabeth was afraid of the public finding out: First, that Elizabeth Gossett, the dynamic, self-directed wife and mother was one and the same person as Elizabeth Hughes, the desperately ill diabetic girl; second, that her emancipation from the fatal destiny was, quite possibly, purchased at the expense of another child’s life. She destroyed pictures of herself taken during the period of her declining health. Both to protect herself and to protect her father’s reputation from any suggestion of impropriety she expunged all references to diabetes in her father’s papers. In 1974 she founded the Supreme Court Historical Society with a friend on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Warren Burger. For the rest of her life she guarded the reputation of Charles Evans Hughes. His image presided over the Gossett household in the form of a large portrait that hung above the mantle for as long as Elizabeth lived.

During Elizabeth’s life, attitudes toward disease changed so dramatically that it is hard to imagine the stigma carried by the word “diabetes” in the first half of the twentieth century. Today it is common for those afflicted with a disease to use their personal experiences to educate, inspire, and assist fellow sufferers: Evelyn Lauder and Elizabeth Edwards did so for breast cancer; Ryan White and Magic Johnson did so for AIDS; Betty Ford and Kitty Dukakis did so for alcoholism; and Nancy Reagan did so on behalf of her husband for Alzheimer’s.

Elizabeth Gossett did just the opposite. Throughout her desperate struggle to live, her family assiduously eschewed publicity about her condition. When the fact of her disease appeared in newspaper ink despite these efforts, she depended on the public’s short attention span and insatiable appetite for news to allow her to slip into obscurity once she had endured her fifteen minutes of fame. She succeeded in fulfilling her dream of living a normal life. Insulin made that possible. For her to have received insulin and yet live as a diabetic would have betrayed Dr. Banting, her parents, and the anonymous child who may or may not have been denied the insulin that she received. It would be a dishonor to the miraculous transformation from invalid to normal girl that occurred in Toronto between August and November 1922. In living as she did, she was true to herself, if not to truth.

Just as Frederick Banting was born ordinary and lived an extraordinary life, Elizabeth Hughes was born extraordinary and lived an ordinary life. Elizabeth continued to protect the normalcy of her existence throughout her adult life, first in New York and then in Michigan. She volunteered for many community, educational, and professional organizations. She served as a trustee of Barnard College and Cranbrook Academy of Art. She was a founding trustee of Oakland University. She was founder and president of the Supreme Court Historical Society. The Hughes Gossett Award, named in her honor, is awarded annually by that society to the best student paper on the history of the court. In 1979 she received an honorary doctor of laws degree from New York Law School. When her name appeared in print, it was related to her philanthropic activities. As years went on, if people queried her about a childhood illness, she would often feign confusion and suggest that they must be thinking of her sister Helen. She never involved herself with any cause related to diabetes. Her will was devoid of any bequest to diabetic causes.

Other insulin takers in that era followed their own paths. As an adult, Myra Blaustein also devoted herself to nondiabetic-related charitable work. She coordinated volunteer activities at the only hospital for mentally ill people of color in Maryland. Her special project, which she introduced to the state of Maryland, was beauty-shop therapy. She never married.

Ruth Whitehill married John J. Leidy of Baltimore, cofounder and president of the Leidy Chemical Corporation. Both Myra and Ruth died in the Baltimore area at age forty-two, three years apart.

Jim Havens, the first American to receive insulin, had an unusual sensitivity to insulin produced from pork pancreas. He would have died, but Eli Lilly and Company supplied him with insulin produced solely from beef pancreas, which did not elicit a reaction. Jim married, fathered two children, and enjoyed a career as an artist. His prints and paintings are considered part of the color woodblock revival in America and may be found in the collections of the Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Teddy Ryder kept in touch with Banting until Banting’s death in 1941. He spent his adult life working as a librarian in Hartford, Connecticut. He never married. On July 10, 1992, he celebrated a record seventy years of insulin injections, outlasting even Elizabeth Hughes. When he died in 1993 at age seventy-six, he was the last surviving member of the original group of patients treated by Banting. His scrapbook is now at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

Leonard Thompson, the first human trial case for injected insulin, died at Toronto General Hospital thirteen years and three months after his initial injection of “Macleod’s serum.” He was twenty-seven years old. Today, visitors to the anatomical museum at the Banting Institute at the University of Toronto may see Leonard Thompson’s pancreas, which is displayed in a jar of formaldehyde as item 3030.

Blanche Burgess, the nurse and constant companion who played such an instrumental role in the life of Elizabeth Hughes, died of a urinary tract infection in 1967 at the age of seventy-seven. She died a widow, having never remarried. Her body was discovered by a neighbor. She is buried alone in a crypt in the “Corridor of Radiant Love” in the Great Mausoleum at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

After Antoinette died in 1945, one day after her fifty-seventh wedding anniversary, Charles grew increasingly close to Elizabeth. He died in 1948 in Osterville, Massachusetts, while summering with Elizabeth Gossett and her family. Truman ordered the nation’s flags lowered to half-mast. He was buried next to Antoinette, Helen, and his parents in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Before his death, Hughes had named Merlo Pusey, the publisher of The Washington Post, as his authorized biographer. Elizabeth worked intensively with Pusey on the project. The Beerits Memoranda is frequently cited in the definitive, two-volume biography that was published in 1951. Among the eight hundred pages there is no mention of Elizabeth’s diabetes. The biography won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952.

Elizabeth Hughes Gossett died unexpectedly of heart failure shortly after a good medical checkup in 1981. At the time of her death, she had received some 42,000 insulin injections over fifty-eight years. Had she lived to read her own obituary in the nation’s leading newspapers, she would no doubt have been pleased to find not a single reference to diabetes or childhood illness. In the Hughes family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York, the name Elizabeth Hughes is conspicuously absent from the gravestones commemorating her mother and father, sisters, brother, and grandparents. Even into death, Elizabeth abandoned the identity of Elizabeth Hughes. Elizabeth Gossett’s final resting place is marked by a small brass plaque in the Memorial Garden at Christ Church Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she and her husband raised their family. She was cremated, ensuring that no part of her would turn up in a jar.

Elizabeth Hughes Gossett had three children, none of them diabetic. In 1982, her grandson Dr. David Wemyss Denning broke the family silence by writing a letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine in response to an article the Journal published earlier that year, “A Case of Diabetes Mellitus.” The letter began, “It may interest your readers to hear about my grandmother, Elizabeth Gossett (nee Hughes) who was Dr. Banting’s and Dr. Best’s third patient treated with insulin (by her own account). Her diabetes was a complete secret to all but her very close family. It is only since her death in April 1981 that it has become public knowledge.”