No record remains of the scene at the school or the panic at the James home on Pearl Street when thirteen-year-old Henry arrived home with his burned and blistered leg.  Henry’s mother, Catharine Barber James, had given birth to seven of her eight children by 1824 and had dealt with manifold accidents and illnesses.  As a retiring, quiet woman, who had had to play a muted part as the third wife of a moody, preoccupied man, Catharine had been forced to practice patience.  But she was in for gory scenes and long-lasting turmoil with her son’s injury.  Henry’s leg was so badly charred that soon it “had to be amputated,” one family friend remembered, just below the knee.  In spite of William James’s position, the job turned out to be “ill-done.”  Such surgery, performed without anesthetic, put Henry through unimaginable horrors, and Henry would spend most of the next two years, from the ages of thirteen to fifteen, confined to his bed.  To help him cope with the pain, his father and his doctors plied him with whiskey and other strong spirits–exacerbating his drinking problem.  Then, at the age of sixteen, Henry suffered another setback.  Alarming black specks of disease broke out on his damaged leg, where the skin had never completely healed or even grown over the exposed bone.  The leg had to be amputated again, this time above the knee–a grisly operation that took place, in May 1828, with only more liquor standing between Henry and the pain.

– House of Wits An Intimate Portrait of the James Family, Paul Fisher

The James Family

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

–          Henry James