The clean white infirmary held ten beds. Here were brought the hopelessly sick from the prisons or poor quarters of Alexandria, the chronically ill, the desperately afflicted. As all the patients were either slaves or destitute, experimentation upon them was sometimes merciless, and quite often the experiments had no relation to the immediate disease at all. This Lucanus found intolerable and hateful, and again only the Jewish teacher understood. The others kindly laughed at Lucanus. “Is it not justifiable that one man die so that others, multitudes, may live?” they would ask him. To which he would reply, while the Jewish teacher listened in searching silence, “No. One man is as important as a mass, and perhaps even more so.”
This queer attitude did not diminish the affection and respect of the physicians. But when Lucanus would lament over a mortal illness and work until he sweated to relieve its pain and to save the patient, all but the Jew were puzzled. Truth, knowledge, was the object of medicine. Death was the fate of all men, and pain also. “Yes, men must die,” Lucanus would say, bitterly. “But is it not our duty to be most greatly concerned with pain? Even the pain of a slave?”
He would not experiment for the sake of experimentation alone. He treated the disease, for to him as to Keptah the disease was the man. Beyond the infirmary was the mortuary, where bodies of slaves and the abandoned who died in the infirmary or in prisons were dissected. The laws of Egypt, unlike the laws of Greece and Rome, permitted such dissection, for slaves and the poor were regarded as soulless, and Egypt was not particularly obsessed by flesh except when it was royal or aristocratic.
The Indu doctor, and assistants, had taught Lucanus the art of vaccination against smallpox. He permitted himself to be vaccinated over and over, and would vaccinate the patients. “You are inconsistent,” one of his teachers would jeer at him fondly. “No experimentation for you!” “He is not inconsistent,” said the Jew. “He only wishes to help the patient, who may recover from his present disease, to avoid smallpox in the future. But he would never operate on our — victim’s — eye, for instance, when that eye is not diseased, nor would he inject a patient with another disease, medicine, or poison merely to observe the result because the patient cannot resist. He will relieve pain, and give all treatment that he believes will relieve pain or that particular disease, but he will not inflict pain or disease in the name of research.”
The Egyptian master and his assistants were specialists. They treated the eye, the heart, and various organs as apart from the whole body, and Lucanus resisted the idea of specialism. “If the liver be ill,” he would protest, “then the whole man is ill, for its toxins reach the blood, the eye, the heart, the stomach, the intestines, the skin. And so with ulcers, degeneracies, and all other diseases. It is not only the peritoneum which is inflamed; the whole body is inflamed in sympathy. Cancer is a disease of the whole man, not merely that part which is attacked. If a man has arthritis he does not have it solely in the shoulder, the knee, or the ankle or the toes or hands. He has it universally.”
The Egyptian doctors would be amused, except for the Jew, who agreed. And the Jew told Lucanus privately, “The disease is not only the whole man, but also his soul. A sick spirit creates a sick body, or a sick body creates a sick soul. Not only must the flesh and its disease be treated, but the mind also. It is very possible, though not proved, that all diseases, even those epidemic, originate in some secret chamber of the soul.”
The patients were not slaves or the destitute or the criminal to Lucanus. They were man, who must be helped to defeat the inexorable hatred of God for man. Their sufferings tormented him personally; treating a man with heart disease, he would feel thrills of pain in his own heart. The arthritis which twisted and crippled the joints of a sufferer very frequently twinged his own joints. He would actually feel the devouring of cancer in his own sound flesh when treating a cancerous patient. A tumor of the brain in a slave would give him pounding headaches. It was as if a disease sent out invisible filaments from the patient, entangling him in its symptoms and agonies.
The Egyptian teacher and his assistants often used magic in the treatment of their patients in the infirmary. This gave rise to comradely hilarity among the learned Greek and Roman teachers, who had long lost their national beliefs in the worth of amulets or incantations or rites. But the Jewish teacher had told Lucanus, “As the soul is also sick as well as the body, it can be cured quite often with mysteries, and, as the disease of the body may well originate in the mind, that mind can be convinced by thaumaturgy that it is cured, and therefore the body frequently cures itself.”
He added, “These Egyptians are not so wrong as the others believe. You will notice that when you lay your hands tenderly and with a kind of fierce resistance on a patient the Egyptians become exceedingly interested, though the others chaff you. For the Egyptians have discovered, from observation, that you have a mysterious healing power. The others are rationalists, believing solely in potions and surgery. The Greeks, however, you have observed, are not of the Cnidos school, which treated only the diseased organ. They also believe, with us, that the sick man is part of his setting.”
Just now Lucanus was particularly interested in a man who suffered from a baffling disease of the brain. Some of the surgeons suggested a tumor; it was not often that they were given the opportunity of studying a living brain. Lucanus suspected that they did not truly believe the man had a tumor. Now that he had completed his studies and was a physician he could make protests which would not have been permitted in a student. Moreover, the patient was the Jew’s, and after he had listened to Lucanus he would not let his colleagues interfere with their eager saws and burrs and trephines.
The man was a slave, and his master had sent him to prison for a petty theft. Under the law he could have had him executed, and actually he had been condemned to death. The master had been persuaded to send him to prison. Within the last few days the Jewish teacher had purchased the poor creature, and had given him to Lucanus as a patient. “If you cure him, Lucanus, he is yours.” “If I cure him,” Lucanus had replied, “then I will purchase him from you and set him free.” “I then give him to you as a gift, and you shall make him free yourself. For I remember we Jews were slaves in Egypt.”
Lucanus went to the man’s bed at once, and the Egyptian doctors gathered around to watch. The slave’s name was Odilus, and he was of obscure racial origin, like many of the slaves in Egypt. He had a thin aquiline face, deep and flaming dark eyes, a sensitive and eloquent mouth, and a tall emaciated body with restless fine hands and long delicate feet. He was about twenty-two years old. He looked at Lucanus imploringly, and in silence, but his hands lifted a little as if in prayer.
Lucanus pulled a stool to the bedside and regarded the slave with anxious pity. He unrolled a papyrus and again scanned the symptoms of the man. No steady pressing pain, as in tumor. No signs of paralysis — yet. No muddying or darkening of the irises. No failing of any faculties or senses. But the man was in agony. He had great control over himself, but often he screamed in anguish, pressing his hands to his head. His blood pressure was erratic; sometimes his heart would bound and leap, though there was nothing organically wrong with it. Sometimes his whole body would go into spasms. Upon his being given a sedative the spasms would quickly subside, and a look of profound relief would settle on the drowsing face, a look most moving and touching to Lucanus. There were no physical signs of disease in any of his organs; his skin, though frequently livid or blotched and quivering, was healthy. But the pains in his head, he had told Lucanus piteously, were either crushing, bursting, darting, piercing, or burning. They varied in intensity and in form, but they were always there in one aspect or another.
The other teacher-physicians strolled to the bed and watched Lucanus make another of his meticulous examinations. They watched him hold a candle to the man’s eyes and again search the irises. They watched him as he commanded Odilus to lift his hands, his legs, his feet, his head. Lucanus searched for exaggerated or lost reflexes. Al
l was practically normal, but the man twitched on the bed and moaned. He was intelligent, and he could read and write three languages, and had been his master’s secretary.
Lucanus folded his bare arms on his breast and considered the man for some long moments. “What is the pain today?” he asked, absently. Near his shoulder the Jewish teacher hovered, watching closely.
“Oh, Master,” groaned the slave, “today my skull is too tight for my brain! It is about to burst from its cage.”
“Tumor, obviously,” said the Greek master, avidly.
Lucanus shook his head, not looking away from the slave. “He has been here for over a month, and shows no loss of any faculty or sense, no epilepsy, nor is there the slightest sign of even the most minute paralysis or blindness or deafness. Reflexes are only a little exaggerated today. No, it is not a tumor, which is relentlessly progressive in its damage. He has said he has had this condition for a number of years, though in less acuteness. He has no tumor, therefore, either benign or malignant.”
His handsome face bent over the moaning slave, and it was filled with commiseration and tenderness and sympathy. He took one of the slave’s hands, and immediately the moaning ceased, and Odilus searched his face pleadingly. Lucanus said, “I will give him essence of opium, not enough to stupefy him but to ease his pain. Then I will question him. There is something stirring in my mind — ” He paused. “Today his blood pressure is dangerously high.”
“Impending stroke,” suggested one of the young assistants.
“It is possible he will have a stroke,” assented Lucanus. “But not from any tumor and possibly not from any disease of the brain. Or any disease of any other member of his body. Could it be possible that strokes may result, at times, from causes other than organic?” he mused.
The slave was given a tincture of opium, which he swallowed ravenously, knowing the relief that would come to him. Lucanus waited. Minute by minute the moans became fewer, the twitching of the muscles diminished visibly, and the carved lines of agony subsided on the thin and mobile face. Odilus smiled a feeble smile of gratitude and did not look away from the merciful Lucanus. His eyes began to close. “I will sleep,” he murmured.
But Lucanus pressed his hand strongly. “Bear with me, Odilus, so that you may be healed,” he said.
Odilus said, with a sob, “Master, I do not want to be healed, for then I shall be returned to my master for execution.”
Lucanus opened his mouth to say something in consolation, and to tell him that his master no longer owned him. But he held back. The stirring in his mind quickened.
“Before you were condemned, Odilus, and when your master trusted you, and you had not yet stolen, you still had these awful pains. Please open your eyes and answer me! Is it not so?”
The drooping eyes opened protestingly. “It is so, Master. Ah, let me sleep! If only,” he murmured, “I had had the courage to kill myself when I was younger!”
“Ah,” said Lucanus, in excitement. “Tell me, Odilus, how long you have been a slave.”
“I do not know, Master. My earliest memory is of being a very young child, and of being conveyed to Egypt by a Persian slavemaster for sale here. I do not know if I was born free or slave. My present master has owned me since I was three or four, and I do not remember my parents or who they were.”
“Why did you steal, Odilus? Your master was not unduly harsh to you, and he trusted you.”
The slave’s dimming eyes quickened into dark fire. “I dipped into his coffers — for he was a very rich man and did not always know the full amount in the coffers — so that I could run far away. I intended to take a bag of gold. But he had sent the money that morning to the stronghold in Alexandria, and there was only one small bag of silver left. I did not want it, yet I took it. Once in the coffers, I could not resist.”
“Why? Such a small amount!”
“Yes, Master.” The slave was silent for a few moments, and his expressive eyes welled largely with some deep and aching thought. “Still,” he continued, “it was a first step to freedom.”
Now he burst into sobs and tears with such intensity that his shuddering body made the cot shake. “Even if I had been able to steal gold it would not have saved me!” he cried. “I should have been found!” He grasped Lucanus’ hand with sweating fingers. “You cannot understand, Master, you who are a free man, what it is to be a slave! Many there were in that household to whom I talked of freedom, and they gave me strange and wondering smiles. Were we not sheltered, fed, clothed adequately, and were we not on holy days, and when we particularly pleased the master, given recreation or even a piece of silver? We were better than the free poor of the city, who slept in gutters or under arches, and begged for bread, or starved. Why, then, an onerous freedom to die like dogs?”
“Yes,” said Lucanus. “Ah, yes.”
The slave looked at him pleadingly, and saw the moistness of his blue eyes. He raised himself on his elbow, forgetting the others present.
“Master, I know now that I wished to steal because I knew I would be caught and killed! And I preferred death to slavery! Can you understand this?”
“Yes,” said Lucanus. “Yes, yes.”
The slave fell back on his bed, and groaned again. “Do not heal me, Master. Let me die here. Then I shall be free forever.”
He held his hands to his head, and his eyes sank in their sockets in a renewal of torment. “Opium, Master. Enough opium to kill me at once. Then I shall fall into a deep sleep and never awaken, and shall be one of the countless company who are forever free.”
Lucanus raised his voice loudly in order to reach the man’s dulling ear. He looked at the other physicians, who were watching intently. “Is there need in this university for a man skilled in bookkeeping and accounts, who can be trusted?” he demanded.
The slave opened his eyes, staring in utter confoundedness. The other physicians frowned, trying to understand.
“He is a slave, Lucanus,” said an Egyptian, “and he does not belong to us, but to his master.”
Lucanus laughed softly, and shook his head. He put his hand on the slave’s cheek, like a brother.
“No. He belonged to my teacher, Jacob, here, who purchased him from his former master, but now he belongs to me, and tomorrow I shall visit the praetor and free him.”
The slave started up in the bed, and uttered a smothered scream of dazed joy. He flung his arms around Lucanus’ neck. He withdrew the arms, caught up Lucanus’ hands, and covered them with kisses. He sobbed and moaned; he was beside himself. His whole face was ablaze. He panted, threw himself on the floor. And then he lay, embracing Lucanus’ feet and alternately pressing his brow to them.
Lucanus lifted him with the utmost gentleness and placed him on the cot again, but the man seized his hand and would not let it go. He looked at Lucanus with adoration.
“My dear colleagues,” said Lucanus, “I repeat my offer, and the offer of Odilus to you. Do you need him?”
“I can use him immediately as my own clerk,” said Jacob, whose eyes had filled with tears.
Lucanus pretended to doubt, and shook his head. “Ah, how very sorrowful this is,” he murmured. “Poor Odilus is free, but he is ill, and who knows if he will recover?”
The sick man started up again, and the blaze was brighter on his face. “Master! I am no longer ill! The pain has left my head; it is clear and cool and soothed! Let me serve here, I pray you!”
“As you will be free in the morning, and are tacitly free now and able to plan your own future, you must not say, ‘Let me’,” said Lucanus, with mock severity.
Odilus, whose eyes were on fire, looked at him as one looks at an angel. Then he smiled radiantly and said, “Master, if the physician, Jacob, wishes my services, it will be my delight to serve him, as a free man.”
“And at a stipend which we shall discuss,” said the youthful and bearded Jew.
“Now, sleep,” said Lucanus, rising. “When you awaken, Odilus, you will be without pain, and th
e pain will never recur.”
The physicians laughed a little and moved away, with Lucanus among them.
A Greek said, with amusement, “Now we are deprived of a living brain to study.”
“But you have seen the dying brought back to life,” said Jacob. “Look at him sleeping there, with the smile of a joyful child on his face. For freedom is more than life to such as he, and may his name be legion. May God grant that soon all men shall be free, so that they do not think of death as the only escape.”
“Odilus suffered from no illness of the body or brain,” Lucanus said respectfully to the pragmatic Greeks. “He suffered from an illness of the soul, and he is now cured. In your rationality you had forgotten Hippocrates.”
Dear and Glorious Physician Page 27