August 22 Tuesday – In Sanna, Sweden Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.

I have looked over the originals of the Dream Sweetheart & Wapping Alice, & perceive that the first does not convey my idea clearly at all; & so, for me it has no value & must remain unpublished. And I perceive that a part of Alice needs re-writing—so she can’t be publishable as she stands. She’ll never get that re-writing. She should have applied while I was interested in her—& she didn’t. I wash my hands of the business.

Sam added they would miss seeing Harry Rogers, as they’d arrive back in London nine days after Harry sailed, and he bemoaned the fact they’d missed seeing the Twichells in London by a day or so.

Of course this is Providence’s affair, Joe being a parson; but I don’t know who is running Harry. Goodness knows I hope it is not the other firm, though deep down I have my shudders when I think.

Jean’s health booms along here in the most surprising & gratifying way. For the first time in 3 years we go to bed untroubled, & get up the same. We can pretend that trouble must come, & several times before her cure is perfect, but we do not bother about that—she is on the safe road. I hope we can go home before spring. It looks like that, but of course predictions are not in order yet.

I have a very good time here experimenting with the system in my own person & watching the patients. I wish you were here & had about a hundred diseases to experiment on, so that I could keep the records. They would knock them out of you as fast as you could call game.

It would be splendid to be yachting around with you these days; but you wait till I come. It will be cold, then, but that is nothing, we’ll go South; I know where there’s some warm weather.

I am very glad my financial affairs are in such good shape. By George they were ill enough when you took hold of them, doctor. I think you & Kellgren stand at the head of the profession: you for a sick bank account & he for a sick body; it is the strongest team I know.

I’ve found a stunning unknown artist here, & I mean to ask the Century to boom him. And I’ll help. His pictures ought to sell. They are water-color peasant-heads, true to a hair, & just delicious for their humor, I think [MTP; also similar is MTHHR 407-9]. Note: in his next letter to Gilder, Sam revealed the artist: Captain O.J. Brander of Vesteras, Sweden, a retired military officer of 50, also a patient of Kellgren’s.

Sam also wrote to Richard Watson Gilder about the six weeks they’d been in Sweden and his amazement with Kellgren’s ministrations. Sam headed it “Pussonal.”

He is a genius; in the Middle Ages they would have burnt him. However, I’ve had 6 interesting weeks watching him do the impossible on other people, & so I’ve had the most interesting summer that ever was. The subordinates take the full college course in anatomy, physiology, &c; also 2 years in a London hospital; then 3 years under Kellgren, learning his system & how to apply it—7 or 8 years altogether; then they are competent, & ready to cure disease.

But that isn’t what I sat down to write about—but this:

Sam then wrote about Captain O.J. Brander, and asked Gilder if he could get a picture of Brander’s exhibited in New York, and act as agent in case someone there wanted to buy it.

Six weeks ago, when I first came, he came to me modestly & wanted to sketch my head, but of course I got out of it as well as I could, on one excuse or another, as usual. A week later I saw a water-color portrait of a patient in the gymnasium & said, “O hell!—who done this?” “Captain Brander.” I went straight for him & said I wanted to sit as soon as my repairs were finished. Would you like to engrave that, too? & then let Bliss use it in my Uniform Edition?

We leave here for London Sept. 27 [MTP].

Sam wrote to Joe Twichell:

Do the doctors say they can help Judy’s husband? Then Kellgren can help him five times as much & ten or twenty or thirty times as speedily. Do they say he is past help? Their testimony is of no value—at least of very little value—being based upon vast accumulations of ignorance, with here & there a grain of knowledge.” Sam thought that Jean’s improvement under Kellgren nothing short of miraculous. “Every thing is thorough; no Christian Science silliness” [MTP]. Note: “Judy” was Julia Twichell (b.1869), Joe’s first daughter.