Mildred Solomon quivered with excitement. This would be her experiment: the X-ray tonsillectomy. After a series of X-rays, testing varying lengths of exposure, the results could be confirmed through surgical excision. She would need a number of subjects as her material. She thought it through in her mind. Eight orphans should do.
In the glow of the light table, Rachel tilted her head to look up at Dr. Solomon’s face. On the warm lap with the heavy cape around them both, Rachel had a surge of affection for this woman whom she wanted so desperately to please. She twisted to wrap her arms around Dr. Solomon’s neck.
Mildred Solomon would have normally been irritated by the child clinging to her like that, but she was flush with the thrill of her brilliant idea. In an unusual show of feeling, she stroked the girl’s head. Her hand came away covered with strands of brown hair. It was a predictable side effect of the X-rays; really, she should have expected it. Taken by surprise like this, though, she couldn’t help but shudder.
“What’s the matter?” Rachel asked, then followed Dr. Solomon’s gaze to the hair in her hand. For a horrible moment, Rachel thought it had grown there.
“That’s enough for today,” Dr. Solomon pronounced, removing the cape and setting Rachel on her feet. She brushed her hand against the side of her skirt to wipe away the girl’s hair. “Let’s get you back to the ward. I have an idea for a new experiment you can help me with.”
Chapter Six
I EXPECTED TO BE EARLY TO THE MEDICAL ACADEMY, BUT there was a delay transferring to the Lexington line, so by the time I got there it had just opened. I’d always thought of it as an exclusive club for physicians and had forgotten about the library until Gloria reminded me. Wandering around, I was impressed by its gilt chandeliers and carved ceiling beams, the stunning views of Central Park through Palladian windows. I lost count of the marble busts and portraits in oil. I thought of my share of the rent for that old walk-up in the Village—that entire place could have fit three times over in this one reception hall. I knew there were magnificent spaces like this all over New York, but I forgot, sometimes, that a brick facade was as likely to encompass unused ballrooms as cramped apartments.
I found the library on the third floor. The card catalog stretched the length of an entire wall. Dozens of drawers high, its little brass card holders were multiplied as in a kaleidoscope. It was amazingly easy to find what I was looking for—the librarians had cataloged not only authors but also coauthors and citations. I walked my fingers over the cards, their edges softened by years of inquiry, until I came to Solomon, M., M.D. I felt a little thrill on discovering this tangible proof of the old woman’s claims. I thought of how pleased she would be to hear I had actually looked her up until I realized that, at her prescribed dose of morphine, she was unlikely to be lucid enough to understand me. I’d have to be content with finally learning what I had suffered from that necessitated all those X-rays.
Mildred Solomon was sole author of an article published in 1921, “Radiography of the Tonsils: Efficacy of a Nonsurgical Approach.” She was coauthor, along with Hess, A., M.D., of a study on childhood digestion, and she was cited in Hess’s book Scurvy: Past and Present. There was also a citation in a recent article about breast cancer by a Dr. Feldman, but that one, I imagined, must be a different M. Solomon. I copied down call numbers from all of these cards, then walked down the catalog and pulled the drawer for Hess as well. Besides his work on scurvy, there were a number of articles on rickets—a quaint affliction one never heard of in Manhattan anymore and of no interest to me. I did notice the Hebrew Infant Home listed as a subject heading for an article on pertussis; I decided to jot down that call number, too, even though it didn’t cite Dr. Solomon.
I went to hand in my numbers, but the librarian was nowhere to be seen. I rang the bell on the counter and soon she appeared, a tall woman with a pixie haircut wearing trousers that reminded me of Katharine Hepburn. She looked over my list of call numbers as I peered at the name tag pinned to her tight knit top: DEBORAH. “It may take me a while to pull these. There’s a coffee shop on the ground floor that should be open by now, if you’d rather wait there?”
“No, I’m fine, but could you tell me where’s the restroom?”
“The only public ladies’ room is on the first floor, off the reception hall. Here, why don’t you follow me?” She lifted a section of the counter and tilted her head. Together, we went through to the stacks, metal shelves from floor to ceiling as far as I could see. “The staff use this one over here.” She showed me to a simple bathroom with a frosted window high in the wall. “The lock’s a bit tricky if you’re not used to it, but you won’t be disturbed. The other librarian doesn’t come in until noon.”
After I freshened up, I found my way to the reading room and settled down to wait. I had the quiet space to myself. Not quite as grand as the rest of the Academy, the reading room was stuffy and hushed, the shelves lining its walls packed with dusty leather-bound books, the huge oak table gouged and scratched by decades of note-taking doctors. I went over to the window and sat in the deep sill, looking across Fifth Avenue to the park. I would have lifted the sash for some fresh air but wasn’t sure if it was allowed, so I contented myself with the view as I searched my mind for more memories from the Infant Home. It was frustrating. I knew they were in my brain somewhere, but I couldn’t make them materialize.
My sources must have been deep in the stacks; it was twenty minutes before Deborah returned, balancing the volumes in her arms. As she bent to put them on the table, I couldn’t help but notice how her breasts fell forward, straining her top.
“Let me know if you need anything else,” she said. I blushed, hoping she hadn’t caught me looking. Thanking her, I turned to the task at hand, excited at the prospect of pulling the past into the present. I wanted to save Dr. Solomon’s article for last, so I started with Hess’s pertussis study. I took the heavy volume of bound journals from the pile and cracked its spine.
If I expected to find some Dickensian description of the Hebrew Infant Home in those pages, I quickly saw I’d be disappointed. The sentences read like dry kindling—clinical descriptions of experimental designs, dispassionate recommendations based on results. Dr. Alfred Hess used the word material for the children in his study, as if we were guinea pigs or rats. The article pointed out that orphans made particularly good material for medical research, and not just because there were no parents from whom to wrangle consent.
It is probably also an advantage, from the standpoint of comparison, that these institutional children belong to the same stratum of society, that they have for the most part been reared for a considerable period within the same walls, having the same daily routine, including similar food and an equal amount of outdoor life. These are some of the conditions which are insisted on in considering the course of experimental infection among laboratory animals, but which can rarely be controlled in a study of man.
I remembered how upset I was at being kept in a crib; it seemed now I should have been grateful they didn’t keep us in cages. Still, as I continued reading, I saw his pertussis study consisted of little more than extended observation. One hundred days of it, to be exact. The charts in his appendix struck me as cold, the way children were numbered and plotted instead of named, but wasn’t that how medical articles were always written? Other than enduring months of boredom, I couldn’t see how the children he’d studied were any worse off. Yet his choice of words rankled: “these institutional children,” as if we were a different breed or race. I doubted he’d compare his own children to laboratory animals. It made me glad to think that Mildred Solomon had been there to mitigate Dr. Hess’s dispassion with a woman’s touch.
I was eager now to dispense with Dr. Hess. I flipped hastily through Scurvy: Past and Present on my way to the index, planning to turn to the pages where Dr. Solomon was mentioned. Halfway through, my hands froze, the book opened to a black-and-white photograph. It was cropped to show a child’s mouth. Just that, not his
or her face, only the mouth stretched wide, the camera’s lens focused on a bloody sore. Transfixed, I stared at the photograph. It was as if that picture had been pulled from a shoe box of memories that now fell from a high shelf in my mind and spilled open on the table before me.
My fingers trembled. I forgot to breathe. I remembered.
I wasn’t one of them, the children in the scurvy study, but from my own crib I watched as they wasted away, joints swelling, sores migrating from lips to arms to legs. One of the nurses charged with supervising their meals began crying one day, spooning some kind of mush into the mouth of a bruised boy too weak to stand, while in the next crib a child was being urged to finish her orange juice.
“It’s almost over,” another nurse encouraged her. “They’ll all be back on orange juice in a few days, you’ll see how fast the sores disappear.”
“Why make them suffer? Dr. Hess can see already what happens when the children don’t get any citrus. Why is it still going on?”
“That’s what they’re trying to learn from all this—how much is necessary, how much is too much. It’s for the good of all children.”
“Not this one,” the nurse said, stroking the sunken cheek of the boy she was feeding.
I blinked hard to dissolve the scene from my mind’s eye. For pertussis, he’d simply confined the children and observed how the disease progressed—it wasn’t as if there was a cure being withheld. But with scurvy? Could it be true that he actually brought on the condition just to test different treatments? I leafed through the book again, catching some passages describing experimental treatments he’d tried: feeding infants dried thyroid glands; infusing blood somehow with citrus and injecting it back into the child. When I was placed in the Infant Home, did anyone know what was going on there? Of course they did. They must have. Here was the book to prove it.
Realizing I would be there all day if I settled in to read, I turned to the index, anxious to discover the extent to which Dr. Solomon had been involved in this. I was relieved to see she was credited with the X-rays, nothing more. I looked at some of the radiographs reproduced in the book, eerie images of children’s bodies cut off at the neck and waist, the captions noting the “characteristic beading of the ribs,” a characteristic I failed to see, that I began to doubt even existed. Dr. Solomon had said all the children were x-rayed, that it was routine. It wasn’t as if it was her experiment. I thought of what Gloria had said, that it must have been hard for her to be a doctor in those days; even today virtually all of the doctors were men. I supposed Mildred Solomon had to do as she was asked. She was only a resident anyway, wasn’t that what she’d said? She couldn’t have interfered with Dr. Hess’s experiments no matter how much she might have wanted to.
I shut the scurvy book and pushed it to the side. I didn’t want to believe Mildred Solomon had been part of the work Dr. Hess was doing, but there was the article they wrote together, “Rates of Digestion in Children: A Radiographic Survey.” It described the study’s objective—the use of barium to X-ray the digestive tract—along with hand-drawn charts and graphs plotting the various settings and exposures. The conclusions seemed simple enough: how much time, in minutes and hours, it took for the barium drink to pass through a child’s intestines. I wasn’t sure why this information was necessary, but again it seemed Dr. Solomon’s role was confined to the radiology. Dr. Hess was the one obsessed with childhood nutrition.
Then I turned the page and saw a picture of one of the radiographs. I felt like I was tipping back in my chair; I actually grabbed at the edge of the table. I had seen this before. A child’s body from shoulder to hip, the barium a bright squiggle through the intestines. But how could I have seen it? On the next page it showed a head turned to the side, the radiograph glowing white where the substance coated the tongue and esophagus.
I knew how it tasted before I realized how I knew. Whether or not the image was of me—that seemed too fantastical—I remembered drinking the milk shakes, the chalk gritty in my mouth. I remembered the time I refused to drink it, that tube shoved down my throat. But who had done these things to me? The impressions and sensations were so vague I hesitated to call them memories. There had been a nurse with big hands, chapped and red. She must have been the one who force-fed me that day. Not Dr. Solomon. Mildred Solomon had only done the X-rays, but those I couldn’t remember. Reading through the article, I realized why.
Chloroform was administered to render material motionless for the duration of the exposure. No wonder the treatments were obscured in my memory like taillights in the fog. I’d seen chloroform used in the Infirmary at the orphanage—Nurse Dreyer kept some in case she had to give a wriggling child stitches. I could imagine Dr. Solomon hovering over my mask with the dropper. Strapped to the table, I would have been unconscious while she positioned the Coolidge tube and made the exposure.
Weren’t the straps enough? I could recall them now, those buckles up and down my arms and legs. I couldn’t understand why Dr. Solomon wanted us chloroformed as well. Did it make it easier for her to think of us as material if we couldn’t move or talk? Maybe it was just our struggling that she didn’t want to see. I thought of the cancer mice, how they must squeak and squirm when the doctors shave their fur to smear cigarette tar on the raw pink skin.
Still, it hadn’t been her idea. She was only the coauthor. These experiments were Dr. Hess’s work. It was Mildred Solomon who took care of me. Hers was the article I cared about, the article I hoped would tell me what I had been treated for. Perhaps I’d had tonsillitis—it seemed likely that’s what had been wrong with me. It wasn’t unusual for children who’d had measles or whooping cough to develop tonsillitis. Had I had measles? Most children did in those days. In the confusing rush of images in my mind, a few details stood out as solid and true: Dr. Solomon’s smile; how she’d say I was good and brave; the way she looked at me, as if she could see right into my soul. I thought about everything Mildred Solomon had given up to be a doctor. Maybe we did substitute for the children she never had—why else would she have sought a residency in an orphanage? God knows we were all starving for mothers.
With a steadying breath, I opened the article authored solely by Mildred Solomon. The opening paragraphs described the context for her study. She wrote that surgical tonsillectomies, though common, carried risks of infection. Some children reacted negatively to the anesthesia, while others were distressed if the procedure was done with a local anesthetic. She referred to famous cases where X-rays had been used to shrink tumors. She made it sound like a reasonable idea to attempt to treat tonsillitis with X-rays. She couldn’t have known at the time what it would do to us. I was sure, now, that’s what happened: when I developed tonsillitis, Dr. Solomon attempted to cure me with this innovative, noninvasive technique.
Except, as I continued to read, I learned that wasn’t it at all.
Material was chosen expressly for the health and vigor of existing tonsils to exclude the possibility of infection compromising results. For each subject enrolled in the study, the angle of the rays and the number of filters was kept the same in order to isolate results from this initial experiment on the optimal length of exposure. Of the eight subjects enrolled, each was given a calculated increase in exposure (see chart in appendix). The forthcoming paragraphs will describe in detail these calculations and will be of interest primarily to radiologists, as will the illustrations (see figures 1 through 3) of the positioning of the material and the angle of the Coolidge tube. Surgical excision of the tonsils at the conclusion of the study yielded promising results and point unequivocally to the continued need for further experimentation. Summarily, my conclusions were thus: of those subjects receiving the least amount of exposure, the tonsils reflected deterioration inadequate to replace surgery. Of those subjects at the mean, it was the opinion of the surgeon that the tonsils were deteriorated sufficiently to make surgical excision redundant. Of the subject at the extreme, however, burns associated with the penetration of the rays caused
irritation and the potential for scarring at the points of entry. While all material developed alopecia as a result of their exposure, it is my opinion that the condition will resolve itself for most of the subjects. In future iterations of this experiment, I would strongly suggest starting with younger children so that a more sustained follow-up period can be accomplished within the controlled conditions of the institution. Unfortunately, these subjects were transferred from the Hebrew Infant Home at the conclusion of the experiment, and thus were unavailable for further observation.
I pushed my chair back. The pulse in my neck throbbed and the corner of my eye twitched. The walls of the reading room closed in on me, dusty and suffocating. I had to get away. On unsteady legs, I went downstairs to the coffee shop. The bitter liquid filled my mouth as the caffeine focused my thoughts.
Mildred Solomon was no better than Dr. Hess. She had used us like lab rats, for no reason other than medical curiosity. But it was more than that, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she told me this article secured her position in radiology, that she never had to work with children again? Not only wasn’t she trying to cure us—she was using us to make her reputation. I felt like one of those girls you read about sometimes in trashy magazines, the ones who are drugged at parties and wake up, minds blank and bodies defiled.
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