Morning wore slowly to noon and passed into afternoon. If the condition grew no better, it was at least no worse. The temperature was stationary at 105½. But the pulse labored and flickered. It was difficult to keep Dinty quiet when the delirium beset her; yet every sound forced through the straining throat was so much essential strength expended.
For a time the problem of keeping the passage clear enough for breath was simpler. This did not deceive Horace with undue hopes. The disease was the most treacherous of all the enemies he was called upon to confront. It lurked and struck.
Dr. Murchison left at three o’clock to make his rounds. Horace overheard him promising to send a glazier to repair the sash.
“If you do,” he threw over his shoulder, “I’ll put my boot through it.”
“I will return at five o’clock unless summoned earlier,” said the departing physician to Mrs. Jerrold who was imploring him to stay.
That hour found Dinty’s condition unchanged. But with the fall of darkness, the fever rose again.
“Night air,” said Dr. Murchison glaring at the window. “Deadly! Deadly!”
As if to bear him out, the figure on the bed shivered all over and stiffened. The choking set in. Strive as he might with forceps and probe, Horace could no longer keep the narrowed channel from clogging. Dinty began to gasp. The cyanotic blue showed on lips and fingernails. In her face the red of fever was supplanted by the dreaded lividity of slow strangulation.
Horace dropped the forceps and caught up a blade from his lancet box.
“Aha!” snarled Murchison triumphantly. “Now he bleeds her. Pray God it be not too late.”
“Hold her head back,” Horace directed the nurse. “Farther. So.”
“What are you going to do?” gasped the Squire.
“Tracheotomy.”
“What is that? What does he mean?” cried Mrs. Jerrold.
“He’s going to cut her throat,” roared Murchison.
“Murder! Murder! Murder!” Mrs. Jerrold’s shrieks rang through the house.
“Keep her off me,” warned Horace as she rushed at him, only to be caught and pinioned by her husband. His face was agonized as he whispered to Horace,
“Must it be done?”
“She’s dying. Smothering. Can’t you see? Now let me alone.”
He made the small, neat, perpendicular incision as he had once seen the great Vought do it over the protests of a group of consultants—thank God for that remembered lesson!—fixed a tube in the orifice, and heard the air rush, in great, life-giving gasps to replenish the flaccid lungs. Slowly the face changed from a leaden mask to the similitude of human flesh. The spasm-strained muscles relaxed. The head was eased back upon the pillow where it lay quiet, no longer twisting and turning in the anguish of breath denied. And all the time Murchison was bleating like a distracted sheep, “Tracheotomy is not recommended. What says the learned De Weese? Tracheotomy is not recommended.”
“He has cut our daughter’s throat,” sobbed Mrs. Jerrold wildly. “Who will mend it?”
That would be a later problem for Horace to meet. The immediate crisis was still acute. After midnight came the first real change. Almost imperceptibly the pulse abated. The fever dropped. Only a degree, to be sure, but it was hopeful. Horace got some warm milk with a few drops of brandy into the stomach. Dawn found him still at his post.
“I think she’ll do now,” said he unsteadily, and gulped the spirits which Squire Jerrold held out to him. Horace was still very young. An older and more experienced practitioner would not have put so much of himself into any case.
He gave the nurse instructions and went home to wash face and hands in hot vinegar. Most of the authorities concurred in the theory which Dr. Murchison had aired, that croup, rattles, cynanche trachealis, cynanche maligna, call it what one might, was “epidemic and not contagious.” It was caused by uncomprehended climatic conditions, or perhaps subtly poisonous exhalations from the decaying earth. Horace had his heretical doubts.
They were strengthened when, a few days later, seven new cases appeared in the village, one of them Marcus Dillard. Dinty’s swain recovered, but two children died.
Horace made a deft repair of Dinty’s wound and anticipated, having done so well, being called in on some of the other cases. He was disappointed. By hint and innuendo Dr. Murchison, working so cunningly that the evil report could never be traced to him, spread the rumor that the new doctor had cut a hole in Araminta Jerrold’s windpipe, despite the tears and entreaties of her mother, and that the poor child would never speak again. That she was alive after the experience at the hands of so reckless an experimentalist was a mystery which Dr. Murchison could not explain, but covered by his familiar formula,
“Anomalous, anomalous. A thoroughly anomalous case.”
He awaited only the appearance of Dinty in public to bring in his indictment to the medical board. But the girl upon her release from the sickroom talked as much and as briskly as before.
Dr. Gail Murchison preserved his complete notes of the case for future use.
In his care of the convalescent, Dr. Amlie made certain observations.
“How old is Dinty?” he asked the father.
“Fourteen. Why do you ask?”
“Why, she told me last year …”
“Yes, yes, I know.” Squire Jerrold smiled. “She’s a strange child. She has always resented having to grow up. So she pretends to be younger than she is. I would not say but what her mother has abetted her in the harmless deception.”
Horace suffered an inexplicable pang. Dinty growing up! He felt as if he were threatened with the loss of something precious.
– 17 –
My Uncle Horace is a Hero. And I was not Scared much, my own self.
(DINTY’S DIARY)
Winter broke early that year. The gangs, reinforced, attacked the ground before the frosts were fairly out of it, Genter Latham’s being the earliest. Local advertisements called for two thousand pairs of knitted woolen gloves against frostbite, and many a weary housewife burned her bayberry candle to the click of bone needles, earning pin money for her summer furbishings. The Latham squad, with lusty song, pushed the cut through the village, west to east, between the turnpike and the creek.
“Rochester to Albany in 1822,” exulted Elder Strang’s weekly organ which, in a burst of local patriotism, had changed its name to The Western Farmer & Canal Advocate.
Horace Amlie surveyed the foul mudholes formed by natural seepage with a morose eye.
“We shall have disease,” said he to Genter Latham and Squire Jerrold, as they sat on the Latham porch.
“What kind?” asked the Squire uneasily.
“Dysentery and diarrheas certainly; fevers probably.”
“We’ve always been a healthy village, uncommonly healthy,” protested Mr. Jerrold.
“So have the others, until the canal came,” returned Horace. “We learn nothing from their mistakes. See how sickness follows the canal. Rome fever, Montezuma malaria, Schenectady shakes. Our turn is coming unless we take action.”
“Move the village away, I suppose, like you moved my camp,” grinned Genter Latham.
“I’d like to. Our worthy citizens have been using the ditch as a convenient dump-heap, drain and cesspool,” said Horace. “I could show ’em some things.”
“Show ’em to us,” said Genter Latham.
“Come to my office and I will.”
With the first warm weather Horace had been collecting from the fouled accumulations of water, flies, mosquitoes, and other insects and preparing slides from what he found on their feet. One of these he fitted to his microscope while his two visitors stood, expectant.
“Take a look, gentlemen,” he invited.
Genter Latham applied his eye to the barrel. Knowing him to be anything but an impressionable person and expecting little from the exhibit, Horace was agreeably disappointed. Mr. Latham was so impressed that he vomited.
“Fetch that contraption of
yours to our meeting tomorrow,” said he after being restored with a tot of brandy. Both he and the Squire were village trustees.
“We’ll make it a public hearing,” added Mr. Jerrold. “Let ’em all hear what you’ve got to say.”
The Big Room of the Eagle was well filled with representative citizenry when, on the stroke of seven, Chairman Levering’s gavel descended. Rather sourly he announced that there would be a discussion of the town’s state of health. For his part, he couldn’t see but what they were doing well enough. Those things were in the hands of Divine Providence, so why go out to meet trouble before it arrived? With which ungracious introduction Horace was invited to take the floor. He spoke briefly and modestly, citing the course of the fevers which had so hampered and delayed the canal’s progress. Would it not be well for the village to take measures in advance?
“What sort of measures?” asked Trustee Van Wie.
“Well, cleaning out some of our filthy dump-heaps and cesspools.”
“Is this young gentleman from the Oneida wilds implying that our village is filthy, Mr. Chairman?” inquired Ephraim Upcraft.
“You’ve got a nose,” said Horace shortly. “Use it.”
“I don’t poke it into other folks’ backyards.”
“You might try your own. Your cesspool is surface-full. I can smell it in my office when the wind sets that way.”
Carlisle Sneed, who had been patiently awaiting a chance to be funny, now saw and seized it. “Move we appoint Doc Amlie privy counselor to the town,” he giggled.
The laugh apprised Horace that he was on the wrong tack. A man’s privy was his castle to every true American. He tried another angle.
“There’s a compost heap at the bend of the creek that ought to be cleared away,” he said.
“Dot’s my doomp-heap,” said Simon Vandowzer in his heavy, Dutch drawl. “Vot’s de madder of it?”
“It breeds flies and mosquitoes.”
“Vot off id? Vot’s de madder off flies and mosgeedoes?”
“They’re not healthy.”
“Hunca-munca!” snorted Dr. Murchison. “Mr. Chairman, does my college-bred young friend insinooate that there is any harm to humans from the innocent winged creatures of the air?”
“Ever sit on a bumble bee, Doc?” interpolated Mr. Sneed.
“I do,” said Horace, answering Murchison, “mean just that.”
“Maybe you hold that bugs carry disease. Is that it?”
“You once quoted the learned Dr. Hosack to me, sir. Are you aware that he held filth responsible for jail-fever and dysentery?”
“We ain’t in jail,” retorted his opponent. “And where’s your dysentery?”
“It will come,” replied Horace boldly, “just as sure as present conditions are left unremedied. I’ll stake my professional reputation on it.”
Old Murch got out of his seat and paced the floor, stopping before his young competitor and thrusting a long and not-too-clean finger at him. Under the stress of excitement and resentment, the old fellow’s medical polish dissolved. His voice became a throaty caw.
“Git back to your fevers, young man. Now, you tell us a canal fly catches canal fever. Huh? And passes it along to human folks. Huh? Is that it?”
“Mosquitoes rather than flies.”
“Oh-oh! Moskeeters! And how do the moskeeters do it, young fellow? Tell us that. They catch it, says you. Did you ever see a moskeeter with the shakes?” He beamed triumphantly about him. The grin said that he guessed that would settle the young jackanapes’s hash.
“It is believed that they carry fomites,” replied Horace, reddening.
“What’s a fomite?”
“I don’t know precisely, but …”
“I warrant you don’t. Nor nobody else.”
“… but it is supposed to be a microscopic molecule that disseminates the disease principle which it absorbs from swamps and filth.”
“Listen to him, gentlemen! Listen to young Dr. Wisdom! Flies carry the gut-wambles. Moskeeters catch the shakes and carry ’em to you and me. Bats fetch around the yellow jaunders, I wouldn’t wonder, and jaybirds scatter the itch. Ever hear that the doodlebug’s bite gives you vapors on the brain, young fellow? Sure you ain’t been bit by one, yourself?”
“Giving the town a bad name,” growled Mr. Van Wie.
Discontented mutters arose in support of the complaint. Horace found himself confronted by the smug conservatism of settled and self-satisfied prosperity which resents any suggestion of change as a threat.
“Mr. Chairman,” said Dr. Murchison, resuming his canonical air, “may I offer an eloocidation of the problum?”
“We shall always be honored to hear from a gentleman of Dr. Murchison’s wisdom and special knowledge,” said the Chairman pointedly.
“Thank you, sir. My young colleague”—he waved a patronizing hand toward Horace—“is a sad example of what the Hymn Book terms ‘learning’s redundant part and vain.’ Let me first put him right on the nature of fever. All fevers are one and the same in essence, whether they are intermittent, remittent, bilious-remittent, lung fever, gut fever, or brain fever. They manifest themselves in different symptoms and stages. There is the simplex stage, the typhous stage, the depressive stage, the inflammatory stage and the malignant or putrid stage. The cause, my friends, is not in any silly bug-bite. It is in decaying matter, such as leaves, plants and rotten wood which exhale gases, humors and dangerous miasmas to be absorbed by the human system. All this talk of bugs and fomites is so much hunca-munca and folderol-diddle-de-day. No, no, my young and fancy-minded sir! Don’t try to meddle with the laws of nature and the privies of your fellow citizens. When the fever comes—if it comes—we’ll handle it with the true-blue, old-style medicaments.”
Squire Jerrold’s suggestion that the Board examine Dr. Amlie’s microscopic slides was swamped. The meeting adjourned. Outside, the Squire said not unkindly to Horace,
“You’ll never make a politician, my boy.”
“Nor do I want to,” said Horace.
“That’s all very well,” put in Genter Latham dourly, “but you’d better get your disease-bugs working for you. Unless there are epidemics of bellyaches and hot foreheads around here pretty soon, they’ll laugh you out of town.”
“Wait till it warms up a little more. I doubt if they’ll feel like laughing then,” returned Horace tartly.
Nature came to the aid of the trustees. Steady rains covered the bed of the canal, drowning out the worst breeding places of the flies, and muddying up the water beyond the tolerance of even the hardiest anopheles larva. Intestinal diseases made their appearance with July’s heat, but not worse than in other years. Malaria was sporadic.
Even among his pals of the smithy, Horace lost face. They regarded him with easy amiability as a well-meaning but discredited faddist. Having no clue to the reasons for the population’s immunity from the expected illnesses, Horace was threatened with a loss of faith in himself, which, for a physician, is the beginning of the end.
As embodying the spirit and hope of progress, a marine apparition, trim and shapely, took form in the stocks back of Palmer & Jessup’s Basin. “The elegant and superb Packet Boat, Queen of the Waters,” announced Editor-Preacher Strang’s paper, “will plow the waves ere autumn paints our fair land with its rainbow palette.”
Not all the traffic now plying the canal sections from Rome to Albany so fired the patriotic souls of the Palmyrans—for, after all, to nine-tenths of the populace these far-off events were only hearsay, whereas seeing is believing—as the birth of the first craft to which Palmyra could point as its very own.
The work was rushed. Earlier than the time set by the fervent prophet, the packet, beflagged and beribboned, was played down the ways by the Palmyra Light Dragoons band in full uniform, into fourteen inches of what might by courtesy have been called water, while the populace cheered itself purple in the face.
Their acclaim was premature. The fifty-fifty composite of mud and water,
after deepening to a foot-and-a-half, dwindled to ten inches, whereupon the regal craft turned on her side like a sick fish and there wallowed, in Carlisle Sneed’s regrettably coarse words, “as flat as a slut on her bum in a puddle.” The Queen crawled back on her perch under cover of kindly night.
Malaria broke out. Horace reported a dozen cases to Genter Latham who was unimpressed and quoted the proverb about the single swallow. His men were now working east of the village and pushing ahead at top speed. But back of his project, the work still lagged. Squire Jerrold’s camp, and several others were, as Old Bill Shea informed Horace, “rotten with the shakes.”
A hard frost early in September saved them, and the village as well, from a more disastrous epidemic. Every time that Horace met Dr. Gail Murchison the older man animadverted upon the disappearance of the malaria and inquired solicitously whether his colleague was “still taking the pulse and temperature of your patients, the bugs.”
That fall saw the marriage of Miss Agatha Levering and the Rev. Philo Sickel, to which Horace was magnanimously invited, and the establishment of Genter Latham’s bank which the Reverend Mr. Strang editorially mistrusted as “a combination of the rich vs. the poor, a moneyed corporation whose power is a menace to free institutions.” Some of the older inhabitants felt uneasily that Latham was acquiring too much power and employing it too arrogantly for the town’s good. The great man went his way, disdaining hostility or, more often, ignoring it. Seldom did it take form in opposition. He was too powerful along too many lines. He had few friends and no intimates except Squire Jerrold. He cared for nobody but himself and his daughter, in whose burgeoning, darkly radiant beauty he took an inordinate pride.
The patronage of the Lathams now operated to Horace Amlie’s professional advantage. To have two such conspicuous young maids as Wealthia Latham and Araminta Jerrold officially under his care was bound to give him a certain cachet, though both were now away at school, Wealthia at the Albany Academy. Through the winter he prospered, financially and socially, notwithstanding the detriment to his reputation as a medical prophet of evil.
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