He wasn’t sure how long the owner would have been content to let him haunt the store without saying anything. Possibly forever, he reflected, had he not walked in one day just as the man had finished tying a bundle of books together with twine.
“Would you like to earn a few coins?” he asked in a soft Scottish accent. “A customer needs these books delivered right away, and if I take them myself I’ll have to close the store while I’m gone.”
Luke was happy to run the errand, and although he was quite desperate for money, refused the coins the man offered in payment.
“It’s the least I can do,” Luke said. “I’ve read my way through most of your stock.”
“Fair enough,” the man agreed with a smile that transformed his long, thin face. “I’m Ben, by the way, Ben Ferguson.”
Luke often ran errands for Ben after that, in exchange for reading privileges. He began taking his class notes with him to the store. He could sit at a small table by the stove and study them. Ben supplied him with regular servings of tea and coffee while he worked. Gradually Luke stopped being so jittery and started sleeping again. Lectures were no longer the torment they had been, and when he didn’t understand something that had been said, he had no hesitation in raising his hand and asking for clarification. He was no longer afraid that this would make him appear inadequate. He was there, after all, to learn.
As he struggled to absorb the information he needed to get through the examinations that were looming, he began to turn to Ben for help. The older man knew nothing of medicine, of course, but seemed happy enough to use the notes Luke had taken to grill him on the indications for the use of cupping and plasters, the pros and cons of administering ergot in cases of prolonged labour, and the pharmacological properties of recipes, compounds, and formulae from the endless list of preparations commonly encountered in a modern medical practice.
It was clear that Ferguson was an educated man, but when Luke asked about this, he merely shrugged, and said that he had had “a few years of schooling, but not in anything useful.” He had a grounding in classical studies, “like all good Scots,” but beyond that he had little to say about his life before he had come to Canada and opened his store.
Luke asked no further questions, although he was curious about Ferguson’s background. The man appeared to love anything that was printed on paper. He constantly tidied the bins of maps that became disarranged when a customer shuffled through them, straightened shelves, and dusted books with a reverent care.
“Knowledge is everything,” he said one time as he rearranged a section of reference books, “and this is where it’s kept.”
Dr. Christie seemed to share Ben’s respect for the printed word, if not his liking for tidiness. The small parlour at the front of the house was filled with encyclopedias and dictionaries, compendiums of English literature and periodicals of every nature. Newspapers spilled from a table under the window and the office itself was home to a stack of leather-bound medical texts jammed, in no particular order, into a bookcase behind the desk.
Luke ran his finger along the titles. There were the usual tomes on medical chemistry, surgical techniques, and midwifery, but Christie had collected numerous other related publications as well. Randomly, he pulled out a book with handsomely marbled boards. It was The Complete Herbal and English Physician Enlarged by Nicholas Culpeper, apparently an addendum to a book called The English Physician by the same author. It was no more than a curiosity, its medical theory based on the movement of the planets, but it did have a number of handsome coloured plates that illustrated the herbs and other botanical sources that Culpeper had found useful, and which Luke recognized as the basis for the current knowledge on pharmaceuticals. He was soon absorbed in the work, fascinated by the careful drawings and acute observations — so absorbed that he jumped when the door behind him slammed open.
Dr. Christie stood in the doorway glaring at him. “For God’s sake boy, there’s been someone pounding on the door for the last five minutes. Are you deaf?”
Luke rushed to the front door and opened it. A young girl stood there, her face streaked with tears.
“Please, could you come, sir? It’s my gran. We think she’s going.”
“Of course,” Luke said. “I’ll just get my bag.”
As he returned to the office to grab his leather instrument bag, he realized that Dr. Christie was still standing at the interior doorway, and that he looked most peculiar. He had removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, over which he had tied a white apron of the sort that a butcher might use. Or at least the apron had once been white. The entire front of it was covered in ugly brown smears and rust-coloured stains. Again Luke was aware of a most peculiar smell emanating from the kitchen behind him.
“You’d better get in here.” Mrs. Dunphy’s voice floated out into the room.
Christie glared at Luke again, then returned to the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.
Luke followed the girl down the street. She led him across Yonge Street and past the Red Lion Tavern, where, even at this early hour of the day, three openly intoxicated men loitered in front.
She turned into one of the short streets that led toward the edge of the escarpment that marked Yorkville’s boundary. Beyond this lay the complex of ravines that scarred the lands around the Rosedale estate.
The girl turned in at a modest wooden cottage, its front dooryard neatly fenced to protect the riot of flowers that bloomed in the beds beside the plank walk. The front door led directly into a small parlour, where Luke’s patient had been installed on a daybed. Not only to facilitate her care, he figured, but also to afford her a degree of privacy in her final days. Judging from the girl’s tear-streaked face, the old woman was a beloved grandmother whose passing would be mourned.
Luke knelt beside the cot and took the woman’s hand. It was covered with dry, parchment-like skin tinged with the blue of the veins underneath. He stroked it lightly and was rewarded when the woman’s eyelids fluttered a little, although the eyes did not open.
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Bessie.” The name startled him for a moment. Almost the same name as his mother’s, and this woman, he judged, was close to the same final circumstance — death was not far off.
A middle-aged, careworn-looking woman and a young man who appeared to be in his late teens crowded into the room.
“I’m Dr. Lewis, Dr. Christie’s partner,” Luke said in response to the question on her face.
“Thank you for coming. I’m Margaret Johnson. I hadn’t heard that there was a new doctor, but then I’ve been so busy with Ma.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventy-eight her last birthday.”
“And has she been ill for a long time?”
“Oh yes,” Mrs. Johnson said. “She has a growth in her stomach. Dr. Christie told us it was cancer.”
Luke peeled back the light blanket that covered the old woman, but he didn’t have to search long to find the problem. Her abdomen was huge, the outline of the tumour clearly visible.
“Has she been in a lot of pain?”
“She was before today. Now she seems to have sunk too low to feel anything.”
There was no mercy in doing anything to prolong this battle, Luke knew. The best he could do was to make sure she went peacefully. He turned to the family members.
“I don’t think she can last much longer,” he said. “But I don’t want to see her go in pain, even if she can’t let you know she’s feeling it. I’ll give her something, just to make sure she’s comfortable.”
“How long?” Mrs. Johnson asked.
“It’s impossible to predict,” Luke replied, “but I would be surprised if she lasts the day.”
The young girl burst into tears at this, but the daughter just nodded. “I thought as much.”
Luke pulled a bottle of commercial laudanum preparation from his bag, then hesitated a moment before he also retrieved the tiny bottle that was
beside it. Pure opium extract. He would strengthen the dose to speed her along. There was no point in letting her linger.
“Could I use your kitchen for a moment?” he asked. “I need to mix this.”
The young man led Luke through the doorway and hovered nearby while he carefully added a few extra drops of opium to the laudanum bottle, pouring it over the kitchen basin in case he spilled it.
“Be a good lad and rinse the basin for me?” Luke directed, before returning to the parlour. Mrs. Johnson lifted the old woman to a sitting position and Luke spooned a little of the medicine into her mouth.
“Let me know if anything changes,” he said. “I’ll come back as soon as it does.”
Luke left them clustered around the dying woman, certain that it wouldn’t be long before he returned.
It happened even faster than he expected. Dinner was ready when he returned to the Christie house, but he had scarcely finished his custardy dessert when there was a rap on the door. It was the young man who had watched him mix the medicine he had given to the old woman.
“We think she’s gone,” he said. “She took a big deep breath and then nothing.”
Luke collected his bag and accompanied the young man down the street toward the cottage.
“It’s for the best, you know,” Luke said.
“I know.”
They walked in silence for a minute or so and then the young man suddenly said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” Luke hoped he wasn’t about to be questioned about the dose of opium he had given. He was sure that the daughter knew what he had been doing, but younger people sometimes had little perspective on dying.
“Are you married?”
It was such an unexpected question that Luke stopped walking and stared at the boy for a moment before he said “No. Why do you ask?”
The boy blushed. “It’s just that …well … do you know anything that will stop urges? You know … at night.”
“Urges to … oh, I see what you mean.”
Luke could feel himself blushing in turn. At medical school there had been entire lectures devoted to the dangers of onanism. Self-abuse could lead to lethargy, sapping of physical strength, blindness, madness even, they had been told. All manner of disease was ascribed to the shameful solitary act, and Luke sometimes wondered if it was responsible for his own difficulties. The professors had certainly claimed that this was so.
“Well … I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Caleb.”
“Well, Caleb,” he said, “sometimes cold baths help. And lots of exercise, so that you’re tired at night and fall asleep right away.” It was the standard advice given on the subject. There were some schools of thought that advocated complicated devices that would interrupt the urge with pain — rings with spikes to deter the swelling, heavy gloves designed to control the hands, electro-magnetic apparatuses that delivered a disruptive shock, but Luke thought these excessive. He couldn’t imagine applying them to himself, and was reluctant to prescribe them for anyone else. “Sometimes I’m not sure it’s so big a problem as they make it out to be,” he ventured. “It’s so common that I expect it’s probably pretty normal.”
Quackery. Blasphemy. Heretical advice of the worst sort. But he couldn’t bring himself to censure this boy so obsessed with his own failings that they concerned him even as his grandmother lay dying.
“Really?” The boy looked a little relieved. “But the church says it’s a sin.”
“Well, you know, sometimes I wonder why God gave you those urges if he didn’t intend you to do something about them.”
“I suppose.” He looked doubtful.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Then you’ll soon find someone. Once you’re married, your troubles will go away. Until then, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
This seemed to be enough to set the boy’s fears to rest. His face brightened. “Thanks. I didn’t feel right asking Dr. Christie about it.”
Luke could well understand the reluctance. The crusty doctor’s response would most likely be a call to have all self-abusers trotted off to the hangman.
They had reached the small house, and when Luke went in to the parlour it was immediately clear to him that the old woman had finally breathed her last. He went through the motions of listening for a heartbeat and looking for a pulse. Then he confirmed her death and left the family to mourn.
The whole encounter left him in an unsettled mind. There had been nothing he could do for the old woman, and she was probably happy enough to leave life behind, but it had reawakened the sense of impotence that had dogged him in Kingston, where nothing he did seemed able to slow the march of bodies to the burial pits. It also reminded him of his own mother’s death, and his heart went out to the grieving family he had just left. Worst of all, his conversation with the boy had reminded him of his own frailties. Caleb would be all right eventually, Luke was sure of it, but without Ben, what was he himself going to do?
Chapter 6
The next morning, Dr. Christie asked Luke if he would mind going into the city, to Lyman and Kneeshaw’s, the apothecary shop on King Street. They had run low on antimonial powder, he said, and gauze for bandages.
“Oh, and while you’re there,” he said, as if it were an afterthought, “could you also get five packets of magnesium carbonate?”
Luke found the last request puzzling. Although the compound was useful as an antacid and laxative, it was seldom required in any quantity. Most patients took care of their own digestive problems rather than bother a doctor with them. But as he was happy enough to get away from Christie’s skeleton for a morning, and curious to see Toronto’s commercial core, he cheerfully boarded the omnibus that trundled down Yonge Street from Yorkville to the new St. Lawrence Market.
King Street still showed the effects of the devastating fire that had engulfed nearly half the city in 1849, although many of the buildings that replaced the old market square were now completed. Their dignified facades were in stark contrast to the warehouses and mills farther south that crowded the waterfront and belched their fumes of sulphur and coal smoke over the entire city whenever there was an onshore breeze.
As he walked along, Luke was able to pick out the familiar lilt of Irish voices. Irish emigrants had settled mostly on the edges of the city, he knew, their temporary shelters becoming more permanent and gradually spreading out until they formed neighbourhoods of a sort. Some of the emigrants found work in the nearby manufactories; some of them migrated into the west in search of farm work, only to wander back to the city when the harvest was over. Luke wondered if he would meet any of the people who might remember him from Kingston, but no one spoke as he walked along. He didn’t know how many Irish had found a home in Toronto. Too many, if some of the outraged citizens of Toronto were to be believed. Every issue of the newspapers featured an irate letter or two about the “drunken Irish” and their outlandish behaviour, including their practice of bathing in the Don River, their thin, pale bodies exposed for all to see. With no water available to the majority of the tenements and shacks that housed them, Luke wasn’t sure what other option they had if they wanted to stay clean.
It was not only Irish accents he heard. The street scene was a veritable Babel of voices. Irish cadence warred with the guttural tones of German immigrants, the burr of Scottish brogues, and the starchy inflections of England, all of them sounding peculiarly foreign against the flattened accent of the Canadian-born.
He soon found Lyman and Kneeshaw’s, guided by the brightly coloured glass globe in the front window, a beacon to the illiterate in search of relief. As soon as he entered the front door, he inhaled deeply, soaking up the spicy astringent smell that permeated the apothecary. Shelves on both sides of the shop were heaped with toiletries, infant feeding bottles and aids, razors and miscellaneous devices to aid the self-medicator, from enema boxes to comfort containers that could be filled with hot water or co
als and placed in a bed to warm an invalid.
The items of particular interest to Luke were found at the rear of the shop, stacked on painted shelves that stretched from one side of the room to the other. At the top, large green carboys held bulk quantities of the most popular oils and tinctures. The shelves below them were filled with shop rounds, their distinctive shapes signalling their contents: narrow-necked bottles of liquid preparations, spouted stoppers for the pouring of oils, wide-necked jars for powdered substances. Along one shelf he saw the familiar labels for opium-based products, OPII, OPHO, RHOEA.
He approached the massive walnut counter with its brass scales and mortar and pestles and handed his list to one of the apothecary assistants. While he waited for his order to be filled, he idly scanned the labels of the multitude of pharmaceuticals available. Extract of belladonna, tincture of calumbra, arsenate of potassium.
When his order was completed, he directed the assistant to bill Dr. Christie’s account, and after one last look around the jumble of proprietary formulations and medical paraphernalia that filled the store, he stepped back out onto King Street.
Luke found he was enjoying the crush of street vendors, newsboys, and housewives on their way to shop at the market. Yorkville had seemed very sleepy and small after his years in a city as big as Montreal. He would walk along King Street and take in the sights, he decided, before heading north. If he grew tired, he could simply board an omnibus that would take him home.
He had turned north when he saw the smoke, a thick, black spume spiralling up from a cluster of frame buildings three blocks away. At first he wasn’t sure if it was a cause for concern or just a greasy emission from someone’s chimney. Then he heard shouting and several men raced past him. He broke into a run and followed. He was a doctor, after all, and might be able to render some assistance should anyone have been caught by fire. Even if there were no casualties, he was willing to man a water pump or pass a bucket if needed. Indeed, he was probably obliged to. He assumed that Toronto, like every other city, had an ordinance that required passersby to assist firefighters when asked.
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