by Emma Fraser
Jessie glanced around, but Sister was nowhere to be seen. ‘I’m still not sure you should be here. Are you related to one of the children?’
‘No, lass.’ His accent was interesting. It had a little of Edinburgh in it, but there was something else too, something that reminded her of the islands. ‘I work down at Leith docks and it isn’t far to walk. I’ve nothing better to do most Sundays ’cept come here for a visit.’
Tommy sat on one of the beds and lifted Jock onto his lap. ‘I was here from the age of eight until I was fourteen,’ he continued. ‘I come back whenever I can to say hello to my friends and the wee ones.’ He ruffled Jock’s hair and grinned at Maisy. ‘I heard Maisy was in the ward and I couldn’t leave without saying hello.’
Maisy climbed onto his lap alongside Jock and wrapped her arms around Tommy’s neck.
Jessie saw that Tommy was studying her and blushed. She didn’t know very much about men, but the way he was looking at her made her feel funny inside.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked with a grin.
‘She’s Jessie,’ Maisy said, before Jessie could reply. ‘We’re supposed to call her Nurse MacCorquodale but she lets us call her Jessie when Matron isn’t here.’
Tommy’s grin grew wider. ‘A rebel, eh? There’s not many who don’t do what Matron says.’
Jessie wasn’t sure she liked Tommy being here, but he wasn’t doing any harm, as far as she could tell, and she needed to get to the other wards. Maisy’s mother was in the laundry and wouldn’t be coming up to see to the children until later.
‘I have to go,’ she said. She pointed to the bell on the table in the centre of the room where the children had their meals. ‘Maisy’s mammy should be along at some point, but if you need me before then, ring that. I’ll be in the ward next door.’
He’d come every Sunday since then and he was always the same, polite to her and gentle with the children. At first Jessie wasn’t sure what to make of him. Surely he had better things to do than visit the poorhouse.
Then one day, when she had a day off, he was waiting for her by the gate. For once he looked ill at ease, twisting his cap between his fingers, despite the new trousers and shirt he was wearing.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Not going in today?’
‘I’ve come to see you.’ He dragged a hand through his hair. ‘I wondered if you’d care to take a walk with me.’
Jessie hesitated, but only for a moment. She was lonely. On Skye there was always someone to talk to and, most evenings, ceilidhs took place where everyone met to gossip and sing songs. Here in Edinburgh, when her day had finished, she had only her own company and her books to look forward to.
‘I’m going to the Botanic Gardens, and if you happen to be going that way, I suppose there’s nothing I can do to stop you coming with me.’
Edinburgh was covered with a grey blanket of smog that made it difficult to see even on a good day, far less one like today when rain fell in short bursts from a sky thick with dark clouds. Jessie never let the weather put her off her walk. Apart from the harbour at Newhaven, the Botanic Gardens was the only place she felt she could breathe.
Tommy trudged next to her, apparently lost for words, and Jessie took pity on him. ‘What’s it like down at the docks?’ she asked.
‘It’s grand,’ he said. ‘Well, perhaps not grand, but the work’s steady. I help build the ships.’ There was a note of pride in his voice.
‘Do you live in Leith?’
Tommy frowned. ‘Aye. I share a room with some others. One day I’ll get my own place. When I’m made foreman.’
Jessie lifted an eyebrow. ‘And is that likely to happen?’
He grinned. ‘As sure as I’m walking beside you.’
Because of the rain, the gardens weren’t as busy as they sometimes were. They passed a woman pushing a pram and another one riding a bicycle. Jessie followed a familiar route, the one that took her past the tea-room. She didn’t always stop there for a cup of tea. Sometimes she just looked through the misted windows to watch the well-dressed ladies holding delicate china cups and taking genteel sips.
Tommy stopped and felt in his pocket, bringing out a sixpence, which he brandished as if it were a pound note. ‘Would you have tea with me, Miss MacCorquodale?’ he asked, with his cheeky grin.
Jessie hesitated again. She didn’t feel comfortable going inside with Tommy. Even with his new shirt and trousers he would be out of place. But she would hurt his feelings if she said no. Their money was as good as anyone’s. She smiled back and took his arm, for all the world as if they, too, were gentry. ‘I’d be delighted,’ she replied in her primmest voice.
After that, whenever she had a day off she would find Tommy waiting for her. They walked for miles, sometimes up Arthur’s Seat, sometimes to the Botanic Gardens or to Newhaven, and once down to Leith docks. She liked Leith. There were women hawking fish, the ring of metal on metal, the shouts of men as they built the ships in the dock and an endless stream of barefooted children playing on the streets or in the narrow closes.
Tommy didn’t take her to the place where he lived, and for that she was grateful. It would be unseemly for her to go to his lodgings with him.
Slowly she fell in love with him. She couldn’t help herself. Although his life had been hard – he had been brought up in the poorhouse after his parents had died from typhus soon after they had come from Ireland – he never complained or indicated that he was anything but content with his lot. On her day off he’d wait for her at the gatehouse. Once, he wasn’t there, and she wanted to cry with disappointment, but a fortnight later he was back. He’d apologised profusely, saying he’d had an opportunity to work overtime and couldn’t turn it down, not if he wanted to hold onto his job.
That was the day he’d proposed. ‘I want us to wed, Jessie,’ he said. ‘I don’t have much, but I’ve enough to support us both and, God willing, a baby in time.’
She blushed when he’d said that. But the truth was, she’d been imagining how it would feel to be held by him. He’d kissed her then, his lips soft at first, but when she’d responded, opening her mouth, his kiss had deepened, leaving her shaky and gasping for breath.
‘What about my job?’ she said, reluctantly tearing herself away from his embrace. ‘They won’t let me stay if I marry.’
‘You’ll have plenty to do looking after me – and the wee ones when they come along.’ He circled her waist with his hands and lifted her against him. ‘Come on, Jessie, say yes.’
She looked up at this man whom she’d come to love almost more than life itself and touched his dear face with the tip of her finger. She hadn’t thought there was anything she could love more than nursing until she’d met him – but she had to finish her training. She couldn’t stop now. Did she have to choose?
‘Do you really love me, Tommy?’
‘More than I thought possible,’ he replied, gazing at her with an intensity that stole her breath.
‘Then will you wait for me? I have two years to go before I can call myself a qualified nurse.’
‘Two years! You want me to wait two years?’ He pulled her hips towards his, and whispered in her ear, ‘Can you feel that, lass? I want you in my bed.’ He laughed shakily. ‘I don’t think I can wait two years. I don’t think I can wait two months, I want you that much.’
‘And I want to be with you, too.’ Jessie blushed. ‘But we’re both young and we have the rest of our lives to be together. Please, Tommy. Say you’ll wait for me.’
He cupped her face in his large hands, looked into her eyes and gave her a rueful smile. ‘If I have to, then I will. But I can’t wait for ever.’ He dropped a kiss on her forehead. ‘Two years, darlin’. Not a second longer.’
Chapter 17
Edinburgh, October 1912
Isabel paused at the door of the lecture theatre and looked around in disgust. The male students were drumming their feet on the wooden floor, like stampeding cattle. Some had managed to get hold of policemen’s w
histles and added to the din with shrill, prolonged blasts. Through a haze of pipe smoke, she watched a student being passed over the heads of his fellows from the back of the theatre to the front. Those not participating in the mayhem were either filling their pipes or lolling back on the benches with their eyes closed. Only one, a bespectacled, serious-looking fellow, sat upright, his book in front of him, waiting for the lecture to begin.
She tucked a stray lock of hair under her narrow-brimmed hat, took a deep breath and forced a smile. It wouldn’t do to show her unease at the first of what was bound to be another series of hurdles. Women doctors had been fighting for years to be allowed to attend lectures alongside the men. To turn tail now would only make the men believe they had been right. Today she was the only woman who had dared to come.
The four years she had been attending the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women had passed quickly. The work had been harder than she’d expected: despite the holidays she had spent helping her father on Skye, she had found she didn’t know as much as she’d thought and had had to study harder than she could ever have imagined, often deep into the night. She had sat exams in botany, zoology, materia medica and physics, and passed them all with merit, except physics, in which she had little interest and had barely scraped a pass. She’d walked the wards, dissected a cadaver, learned how to test urine for sugar by heating a sample with a Bunsen burner and so many other things she wondered sometimes if there was room in her head for it all. At least her studies and her work stopped her dwelling on those last dark days on Skye when her world had changed for ever.
She still missed Papa terribly. All that mattered now was medicine and making him proud.
As she made her way down the steps a man noticed her. He leaned back in his seat and hooked his arms behind his head. ‘Gentlemen, we have a lady in our presence.’ He had to repeat himself several times to be heard. After a minute or so, the drumming and whistling stopped and the figure being passed around was set back on his feet. Fifty pairs of eyes turned in Isabel’s direction and then, as one, the students rose to their feet. For a heart-stopping moment, Isabel thought they were going to walk out in protest, but to her relief, those who were wearing hats removed them and one even sketched a bow in her direction.
Isabel nodded slightly and took a seat. At the front of the semi-circular anatomy theatre a body, covered with a sheet, was lying on the dissection table. Next to it was a trolley with a variety of saws and scalpels. Despite the high-vaulted ceiling, the overpowering throat-stinging smell of formaldehyde filled the room.
She removed her notebook, pen and ink from her bag and placed them neatly in front of her, ignoring the whispers and titters, and the occasional angry cry of ‘It shouldn’t be allowed!’
The doors to her right swung open and a rotund bewhiskered man, wearing a short wool jacket and grey, slightly rumpled trousers, walked into the room. At last Isabel was finally going to hear the well-known chief anatomist, Mr Forsythe, lecture.
Without saying a word, apparently oblivious to the students in front of him, Forsythe exchanged his jacket for a white gown and his assistant tied it for him. With a flick of his wrist, the surgeon removed the sheet from the operating table exposing the cadaver of a female of around forty, with the emaciated look of someone who had been ill for some time before her death.
Isabel felt embarrassed for the woman the corpse had once been. Stripped naked, apart from a cloth covering her pelvic area, and laid out for the students’ curious eyes, the dead woman had a vulnerability that Isabel preferred not to see. She tried not to think of the body on the table as someone who had once been a living, breathing person with hopes and dreams just like the people in the room, or that once she had been someone’s beloved daughter, sister or mother. It was easier to think of her as a mass of tissue, organs and bones. Good doctors, she was always being told, albeit by the male professors, focused on the disease, not the person.
Besides, this was the part of her medical training that she had been most looking forward to: a post-mortem and the chance to discover whether her clinical diagnosis had been correct. When Mrs MacGillvary had been admitted to Women’s Medical two days earlier, Isabel had immediately thought of tuberculosis, which was the main reason the poor of the city were admitted. Her conclusion hadn’t been the result of a razor-sharp medical brain but, sadly, born of seeing too many with the disease.
Although medicine had come a long way in the last fifty years or so, there was still so little they could do to fight the toll that poverty took on the city’s inhabitants. If the men and women of Edinburgh would only seek treatment sooner, the doctors might be able to save more of them, but those most in need – the unemployed, the poor, those who came from the country in search of work – were the very ones who could not spare the few shillings required or afford the time off work to go to the hospital.
She’d tested Mrs MacGillvary for the tubercle bacillus, but by the time the results came back, the woman had died.
‘Obtaining cadavers for dissection is no longer as easy as it was when we had Messrs Burke and Hare to help,’ Mr Forsythe said, referring to the infamous murderers who’d made a living by killing their victims in order to sell their bodies to medical schools. He looked pleased with his joke and the students laughed obligingly. They knew it didn’t do to be on the wrong side of the man whose patronage they might seek one day. Should they in the future wish to set up practices to attend to the needs of Edinburgh folk, they would be dependent on him and his colleagues to refer patients their way.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ Forsythe continued, pulling on rubber gloves, ‘what can we tell about this woman from looking at her?’
Isabel raised her hand, as did several others. But it was Philip Montgomery who answered without waiting to be invited.
‘Apart from being dead, sir?’ Only Montgomery would dare risk Forsythe’s wrath with a quip. It was well known that his father was one of the major subscribers to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. ‘She’s malnourished and has the complexion of a person who drinks.’
‘Her appearance could have other causes,’ Isabel interjected. ‘She tested positive for tuberculosis and that would account for the skeletal appearance. Shouldn’t we discuss her medical history before we make any guesses?’
Forsythe looked at her and pretended to do a double-take, as if he had only just noticed a woman among the students. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I was wrong when I addressed you all as “gentlemen”. I should have said “gentlemen and lady”.’ He gave the last word heavy emphasis to underline that he doubted whether any lady would be interested in medicine, particularly when it involved the study of a naked body.
He studied the roll-call sheet in his hand. ‘Miss MacKenzie, I presume. I must admit I had my doubts as to whether you would join us.’
His words echoed round the oak-panelled room and Isabel twisted her fingers together. She straightened her shoulders and stared straight ahead. She had a right to be there.
‘Not marching with your fellow suffragettes, then, Miss MacKenzie? I would have thought that was more your cup of tea.’ Forsythe wasn’t done with her yet, it seemed.
She bit her lip, keeping her expression composed. ‘I’m happier here, sir.’
Forsythe stopped smiling. ‘If you think you might swoon, please feel free to leave,’ he said.
As if she would. In the first year of her training, she’d been handed a single leg of a cadaver to dissect. Later on, they’d been taken to the anatomy museum at the Royal College of Surgeons and the exhibits had been gruesome. If the sight of the decapitated head of a one-eyed baby hadn’t made her faint, nothing would.
Forsythe took them through Mrs MacGillvary’s medical history, from which it was clear that she had had the tubercle bacillus – even without the sputum result. Then he passed around her X-ray.
When it came to Isabel, she could see the cavitations that were a clear indicator of the dreaded disease.
‘X-rays weren’t available to us
when I was a young doctor – we had only our eyes and our stethoscopes to make a diagnosis,’ Forsythe said, as if this were something to be proud of.
And the fact we now have X-rays is in no small part thanks to Madame Curie, who just happens to be a woman. Isabel resisted the urge to remind him.
Forsythe was holding a scalpel aloft. ‘I’m going to show you how we dissect bodies for post-mortems. It’s possible that some of you will be called upon to do this one day. First, I will cut from the suprasternal notch to the pubis – like so.’ He made a decisive sweeping incision as he spoke and the skin parted easily. ‘Then I cut transversely.’ Now the torso was open, like a divided cake.
He flung the scalpel into an enamel basin and pulled back the skin, revealing the organs. He nodded to his assistant to cut the ribs.
The snapping noise was far worse than any smell and Isabel concentrated hard so that she did not jump each time the bone-cutters bit through bone. At last the assistant was done and the chest contents exposed. Forsythe made a few quick movements with his scalpel, reached in and pulled out the lungs, holding them towards the students in his bloody hands, as if he were making an offering to the gods.
Isabel placed her spectacles on the bridge of her nose and leaned forward. She didn’t need them but she thought they lent her a scholarly air. It was the same reason that, soon after she’d started at the university, she’d exchanged her pastel dresses for dark grey skirts and jackets.
As she had expected, the damage to the organ was immediately apparent. Large cavities had replaced much of both upper lobes, the normal glistening surface scarred and fibrotic.
Forsythe sliced the lungs longitudinally. ‘I will put them on a dish and you may all have a look at your leisure. As it reaches each of you, I would like you to point out a part of the lung and name it. I would also like you to give me a fact about the organ and name another disease that may affect the lungs. Anyone unable to do so must leave the class.’