Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

He had written his account at the request of Professor James, who included it in his Principles of Psychology. In the meantime, Rob had submitted a version of it to the New York Sunday Herald, entitled,

KINGDOM OF THE DREAM

AN ACCOUNT OF THE HASHISH PHANTASIA AS EXPERIENCED BY A NOVICE

It was published in full, September 23, 1888, but he was enraged, and justly so I think, because they ran it simply as a “letter to the editor,” and didn’t pay him a penny for it. He wrote to complain and got a specious letter signed by the great James Gordon Bennett in person, saying that since the communication had been addressed to the “editor” it had been published as a letter, and that it was not the custom of the Herald to pay for things so used.

I doubt that Bennett had read the piece. I don’t think he’d have overlooked the headline possibilities of the fox — Harvard Man Changes into Fox.

Shaler was the only one who gave Robert Wood, Senior, encouragement as to his son’s future when a flood of bad marks brought the doctor to Cambridge to inquire personally among the teachers why his boy was doing so poorly. There were two sides to it, of course. Wood felt, not only at Harvard, but later throughout his studies at Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Berlin, that individual initiative was generally frowned on by professors. In the field of ideas, Wood is an arrogant, at times an impatient, man, and I think he must have been at times an impatient, arrogant youth. I’m not sure he feels that anybody ever contributed very much to him as a scientist. To him the professors might or might not be useful associates in helping to carry out some idea, but he always felt that when ideas clashed, they might be the ones who were wrong. To most of the professors, naturally, he was — like the sheep in the Methodist hymn - “a wandering fox who would not be controlled.”

A good deal of light is cast on this by parts of his own notes covering the period, from which I now quote.

To be able to remove a condition in Greek and Roman History by getting a passing mark in Dr. Whiting’s course on Color Photography looked to me like robbing a child’s bank. I was very poor in the prescribed modern language courses, not realizing that a speaking knowledge of French might add much to one’s enjoyment of Parisian cafe life later on. Nor was I good in mathematics; in fact, I was very bad, both in algebra and trigonometry, which struck me as a fearful bore, as no hint was ever given, as far as I can remember, of what possible use you could ever make of sines, cosines, and tangents of angles. Curiously enough I had stood at the head of the class in plane geometry at Mr. Nichols’s school. I really enjoyed working out the original theorems, and I can’t remember ever having failed to get the solution, though some problems kept me up pretty late at night. There was another boy in the class who was tops in everything, and I worked hard to beat him in geometry, for I was rotten in most everything else. I remember that I worked out what Mr. Nichols accepted as an original solution of the pons asinorum of Euclid. The boy who was tops in everything never amounted to anything, however.

At Harvard I roomed alone in Thayer 66 the first two years, but at the end of my sophomore year was fortunate enough to draw, in collaboration with a classmate, double room 34 in the newly finished Hastings Hall. Our room had a big bay window on the first floor looking directly down the baseball field. The field was surrounded by the cinder track, so that we and our friends had a private box for all of the spring games. The big window seat had cupboards underneath which could be locked up. Here we stored the liquid refreshments. There was a tea table with cups, saucers, and a brass teakettle, for camouflage. It was occasionally used on Mother’s Day or when girls came to the games. We drank beer for the most part, but had sherry and whisky in reserve for jamborees. I drank only moderately, never passed out, and never suffered amnesia. Before reaching that stage, I always felt a strong distaste for anything more, and was having plenty of fun with what I had.

I dined at Memorial Hall, the Student Commons, with the six hundred other sufferers, in spite of the legend that a student had once found a human molar in a plate of beans.