“Graphite found in England was originally used to mark sheep. Called ‘wadd’ in Cumberland, it was found in exceptionally pure form in Borrowdale near Keswick, where the mine was tightly guarded and where miners tried to sneak out with a ‘wadd’ in their mouths.” 

“Early Greek mosaic by Sosus of Pergamon, The Unswept Floor, shows ‘the detritus of a banquet scattered across a white mosaic floor, the banquet still underway: some of the objects—a fowl’s claw—cast shadows showing they are still falling.” 

These are a couple more of the cards I wrote about last time, file cards on which I scrawled down quotes and factoids in the 1990s, thinking I might find them useful in my writing. 

Mostly not, as it turned out. But then I came across this one:

“The French surgeon Alexis Carrel learned how to suture arteries and veins in a way that prevented blood clotting in part by studying with a lacemaker to improve his needleworking skills.”

At the time—only twenty-five years ago!—the net was merely sketched in. My email address was still LesleyKrueger-at-Toronto-Freenet-dot-ca. To seriously research anything on the cards required time, commitment and borrowing privileges at a university library. 

Now, curious about the surgeon and his lacemaking teacher, I only had to punch Alexis Carrel’s name into my search engine, where I found a web of information. (Sorry.)

Wikipedia starts off by telling me that Alexis Carrel won the 1912 Nobel Prize for Medicine for the advances he pioneered in vascular suturing techniques. It calls him French, but he’s referred to as Belgian on the site of fabric artist, Fleur Oakes, currently lacemaker in residence in the vascular surgery unit at Imperial College London. (Her fascinating work at the college hospital is outlined here.)

Oakes gives the sole reference I can find online to Carrel’s lacemaking teacher or teachers. Mainly his mother, she says, along with other Belgian embroiderers and lace makers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Oakes’s website, by the way, offers wonderful embroidered rings, broaches and corsets for sale, not to mention stumpwork mosses in old watch cases. Should you feel the need.

But Carrel turns out to be anything but wonderful. He was a firm believer in eugenics, wanting to get rid of inferior human stock (guess who) and close to the fascist Parti Populaire Française in the 1930s. He also served as an advisor to the collaborationist French Vichy government after the country was occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. 

It wasn’t a fleeting or opportunistic coupling. Carrel was close to Charles Lindberg, the American aviator and fellow fascist sympathizer who called Carrel his best friend.

Yet despite their awful politics, the two developed an important medical device: the perfusion pump, which allows organs to live outside the body during surgery. It eventually made organ transplants possible. 

Carrel also pioneered techniques in wound irrigation and debridement during the First World War that saved many soldiers’ lives, and have been used in medicine ever since. 

So up to now we’ve got Nobel-winning scientist who deserved his prize but was also a fascist sympathizer, if not an outright fascist.

It’s also true that Carrel returned to the Catholic Church after claiming to witness a miracle while on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France. The scorn of the French scientific establishment over his belief in miracles caused him to move to Montreal, intending to farm and raise cattle in Quebec. 

He rapidly bailed on the farming idea, however, and moved south, first to the University of Chicago and later to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. That’s where he spent most of the rest of his career, at least when he wasn’t advising fascists.

“Those who have murdered,” he wrote, “robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gasses. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.”

Carrel strikes me as an extraordinary villain: contradictory, brilliant, restless, superstitious, fascistic and horrible. For a while now, I’ve been mulling over an idea for a novel set in the First World War era. Finding that old card—taking a preliminary look at Carrel—moved the idea closer to the top of the list.

The rest of the factoids I’ll leave to anyone who wants them.