A Treasury of Doctor Stories

by Fabricant, Noah D. ; Werner, Heinz;

  “Can you count it?”

  A pause.

  “No.”

  If only the pulse came back! sighed Antoine. He would have given ten years of his own life to restore life to this little corpse. Wonder what age she is. Seven? And, if I save her, she’ll fall a victim to consumption within the next ten years, living in this hovel. But shall I save her? It’s touch and go; her life hangs on a thread. Still—damn it!—I’ve done all I could. The saline’s flowing well. But it’s too late. There’s nothing more to be done, nothing else to try. We can only wait. . . . That red-haired girl did her bit. A good-looker. She’s not the child’s mother; who can she be then? Chasle never breathed a word about all these people. Not his daughter, I imagine. Can’t make head or tail of it! And that old woman, putting on airs. . . . Anyhow, they made themselves scarce, good riddance! Curious how one suddenly gets them in hand. They all knew the sort of man they had to deal with. The strong hand of a masterful man. But it was up to me to bring it off. Shall I now? No, she lost too much blood on the way here. No signs of improvement so far, worse luck! Oh, damn it all!

  His gaze fell on the child’s pale lips and the two strands of golden hair, rising and falling still. The breathing struck him as a little better. Was he mistaken? Half a minute passed. Her chest seemed to flutter with a faint sigh which slowly died into the air, as though a fragment of her life were passing with it. For a moment Antoine stared at her in perplexity. No, she was breathing still. Nothing to be done but to wait, and keep on waiting.

  A minute later she sighed again, more plainly now.

  “How much left?”

  “The ampoule’s almost empty.”

  “And the pulse? Coming back?”

  “Yes.”

  Antoine drew a deep breath.

  “Can you count it?”

  The doctor took out his watch, settled his pince-nez, and, after a minute’s silence, announced:

  “A hundred and forty. A hundred and fifty, perhaps.”

  “Better than nothing!” The exclamation was involuntary, for Antoine was straining every nerve to withstand the flood of huge relief that surged across his mind. Yet it was not imagination; the improvement was not to be gainsaid. Her breathing was steadier. It was all he could do to stay where he was; he had a childish longing to sing or whistle. Better than nothing tra-la-la—he tried to fit the words to the tune that had been haunting him all day. In my heart tra-la-la. In my heart sleeps . . . Sleeps—sleeps what? Got it. The pale moonlight.

  In my heart sleeps the pale moonlight

  Of a lovely summer night . . .

  The cloud of doubt lifted, gave place to radiant joy.

  “The child’s saved,” he murmured. “She’s got to be saved!”

  . . . a lovely summer night!

  “The ampoule’s empty,” the doctor announced.

  “Capital!”

  Just then the child, whom his eyes had never left, gave a slight shudder. Antoine turned almost gaily to the young woman, who, leaning against the sideboard, had been watching the scene with steady eyes for the past quarter of an hour.

  “Well, Madame!” he cried with affected gruffness. “Gone to sleep have we? And how about the hot-water bottle?” He almost smiled at her amazement. “But, my dear lady, nothing could be more obvious. A bottle, piping hot, to warm her little toes!”

  A flash of joy lit up her eyes as she hastened from the room.

  Then Antoine, with redoubled care and gentleness, bent down and drew out the needle, and with the tips of his fingers applied a compress to the tiny wound. He ran his fingers along the arm from which the hand still hung limp.

  “Another injection of camphor, old man, just to make sure; and then we’ll have played our last card. Shouldn’t wonder,” he added under his breath, “if we’ve pulled it off.” Once more that sense of power that was half joy elated him.

  The woman came back carrying a jar in her arms. She hesitated, then, as he said nothing, came and stood by the child’s feet.

  “Not like that!” said Antoine, with the same brusque cheerfulness. “You’ll burn her. Give it here. Just imagine my having to show you how to wrap up a hot-water bottle!”

  Smiling now, he snatched up a rolled napkin that caught his eye and, flinging the ring onto the sideboard, wrapped the jar in it and pressed it to the child’s feet. The red-haired woman watched him, taken aback by the boyish smile that made his face seem so much younger.

  “Then she’s—saved?” she ventured to ask.

  He dared not affirm it as yet.

  “I’ll tell you in an hour’s time.” His voice was gruff, but she took his meaning and cast on him a bold, admiring look.

  For the third time Antoine asked himself what this handsome girl could be doing in the Chasle household. Then he pointed to the door.

  “What about the others?”

  A smile hovered on her lips.

  “They’re waiting.”

  “Hearten them up a bit. Tell them to go to bed. You too, Madame, you’d better take some rest.”

  “Oh, as far as I’m concerned . . .” she murmured, turning to go.

  “Let’s get the child back to bed,” Antoine suggested to his colleague.

  “The same way as before. Hold up her leg. Take the bolster away; we’d better keep her head down. The next thing is to rig up some sort of a gadget. . . . That napkin, please, and the string from the parcel. Some sort of extension, you see. Slip the string between the rails; handy things these iron bedsteads. Now for a weight. Anything will do. How about this saucepan? No, the flat-iron there will be better. We’ve all we need here. Yes, hand it over. Tomorrow we’ll improve on it. Mean-while it will do if we stretch the leg a bit, don’t you think so?”

  The young doctor did not reply. He gazed at Antoine with spell-bound awe—the look that Martha may have given the Saviour when Lazarus rose from the tomb. His lips worked and he stammered timidly:

  “May I . . . shall I arrange your instruments?” The faltered words breathed such a zeal for service and for devotion that Antoine thrilled with the exultation of an acknowledged chief. They were alone. Antoine went up to the younger man and looked him in the eyes.

  “You’ve been splendid, my dear fellow.”

  The young man gasped. Antoine, who felt even more embarrassed than his colleague, gave him no time to put in a word.

  “Now you’d better be off home; it’s late. There’s no need for two of us here.” He hesitated. “We may take it that she’s saved, I think. That’s my opinion. However, for safety’s sake, I’ll stay here for the night, if you’ll permit me.” The doctor made a vague gesture. “If you permit me, I repeat. For I don’t forget that she’s your patient. Obviously. I only gave a hand, as there was nothing else for it. That’s so, eh? But from tomorrow on I leave her in your hands. They’re competent hands and I have no anxiety.” As he spoke he led the doctor towards the door. “Will you look in again towards noon? I’ll come back when I’m done at the hospital and we will decide on the treatment to follow.”

  “Sir, it’s . . . it’s been a privilege for me to . . . to . . .”

  Never before had Antoine been “sirred” by a colleague, never before been treated with such deference. It went to his head, like generous wine, and unthinkingly he held out both hands towards the young man. But in the nick of time he regained his self-control.

  “You’ve got a wrong impression,” he said in a subdued tone. “I’m only a learner, a novice—like you. Like so many others. Like everyone. Groping our way. We do our best—and that’s all there is to it!”

  Allergies and the Man-Eating Carp

  HOWARD VINCENT O’BRIEN

  AT THIS point, I think I should say something about the delicate subject of constipation. Though why it should be called “delicate,” I do not know, since it is almost the principal theme of the radio and is frequently discussed in the advertising pages of the newspapers.

  As a matter of fact, constipation is a peculiarly American intere
st, and children are made aware of it at regrettably tender ages.

  One of the first questions a doctor asks of a patient concerns the behavior of the latter’s bowels. As a nation, we have become so bowel-conscious that the sales campaigns for laxatives are never based on the desirability of using a laxative but on the superiority of one laxative to another. It is presumed that nobody reaches the age of puberty without becoming addicted to laxatives.

  It is heresy, therefore, for me to raise a dissenting voice. Through the years, however, I have come to certain conclusions about physiology; and one of them is that constipation is a phenomenon akin to stuttering. It is a form of self-consciousness. It has a certain analogy to that other great American ailment—insomnia.

  I suspect that the chief cause of sleeplessness is the fear of sleeplessness. I believe that if a person can get himself into a state of not caring whether he sleeps or not, of believing that he is in repose even if his eyes are open and his mind busy, he will forthwith fall asleep. I have an idea that the insomniac is much like the centipede, who got along all right until he began worrying too much about how his legs worked.

  I have the same theory regarding constipation; and I was able to demonstrate its soundness by treating a friend who had suffered from constipation all his life and lived on a diet made up almost wholly of pills, agar-agar and mineral oil.

  In a magazine, I read of a scientist who had made some realistic experiments on himself. He had managed to go without a bowel movement for two weeks. (Maybe it wasn’t quite that long. I have a treacherous memory for statistics.) But it was long enough to prove that “regularity” was essential neither to health nor happiness. Aside from a sense of congestion and a slight headache, the scientist experienced no ill effects from the experiment.

  I told my friend about this, but at first he declined to listen. I insisted, however, that he had nothing to lose. Despite all the thought and money he spent on achieving a daily evacuation of his bowels, he was a walking cadaver, depressed and enervated, really better dead than maintaining the poor semblance of life which was his.

  He yielded, finally, to my entreaties, and agreed to make a trial of using no laxatives but fruit and figs—if he could, to get the very thought of laxatives out of his mind.

  I didn’t see him for several weeks. And what a change. In place of the gaunt picture of misery I had known, was a brisk and hearty fellow, slapping his chest with the joy of living. As if he had discovered the idea for himself, he assured me that the movement of the bowels was exactly like the process of breathing. The royal road to vim and vigor was never to think about either of them.

  Believe it or not, that is what he said. And if you don’t choose to believe he was right, well, there is certainly no law to compel you to.

  I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that there is no such thing as intestinal disease. Alas, there is. And it isn’t always mental, by any means.

  Only the other day a medical friend of mine showed me a new and amazing device for intestinal diagnosis. It looks like a tommy gun with a ten-inch barrel. This is rammed as far as it will go into the customer’s interior, and then slowly withdrawn. As it travels, it takes colored movies of the flora and fauna encountered along the way.

  Pretty soon, we shall have no privacy left at all!

  But enough of such digression. Let us return to our memoirs.

  It was in about the fourth year of my travail that the subject of allergies first swam into my ken. The medical world had been making some strange discoveries along this line. And when I heard of a man who ceased to have nervous breakdowns when he stopped taking cream in his coffee, I decided to find out what allergies I had, if any.

  I visited a young physician who had made rather a specialty of this branch of medicine and was eager to experiment. He made me strip to the waist, and then, with a sharp knife, made an incision in my back. Into this he rubbed some foreign substance, such as extract of lima beans. In all, he made 144 of these slits, with a different substance in each one.

  I couldn’t see what was going on, but my wife, who watched the proceedings closely, said I had a back like a New Mexican penitente during the Easter Week flagellations.

  With all the slitting and rubbing-in completed, the doctor sat down to watch what happened. And that was a pretty discouraging business; for practically nothing happened. The only sign of reaction—shown by a slight reddening of the skin—was around the cut filled with carp. Yes, that’s no typographical error. I said carp and I mean carp—C-A-R-P. It’s a kind of fish. Goldfish are carp, in case you didn’t know.

  This reaction was instructive but not particularly helpful, since to the best of my knowledge and belief I have never eaten a carp and never expect to. Someday, though, I am going to eat a brace of carp, just to see what happens. Maybe I shall fizz and explode!

  The doctor was nonplussed but not defeated. He was willing to concede that the back-slitting had led up a blind alley, but he was reluctant to quit without exploring the possibility of bacterial allergy. He explained that some people are allergie to certain kinds of viruses, even if not to such things as feathers, face powder, or carp. So he went roaming up my nose, getting samples of the subvisible life lurking there. From these he made cultures, later vaccinating me with them.

  The only result of this was a moderately sore arm. The specks continued to dance and sparkle in my vitreous, and the dark archipelagoes of my scotomas continued dark.

  Once more I was back to the starting point, and beginning to get discouraged.

  Here let me digress for a moment on the subject of the doctor and his problems.

  I have often thought that the old Spaniard who sought the fountain of eternal youth looked for it in the wrong place. Instead of chasing around the swamps of Florida, fighting off alligators, red-bugs, and real estate salesmen, and getting older every minute, he should have seen his doctor.

  If you feel excessively mature and want to be rejuvenated, just ask your physician a few searching questions about what ails you. His manner of replying is guaranteed to take years off your age. You’ll suddenly become young again—about five and a half, and not very bright at that. You’ll be made to feel like a kindergarten freshman who wants to know how babies come.

  The doctor has a reason for treating you like a low-grade moron, and I’d be the last to say that it isn’t a good reason. How, asks the doctor, can a patient be trusted with any important information about himself when just having his pulse taken makes his heart race with terror and the mere recording of his blood pressure scares him half to death?

  By painful experience, the doctor has learned that the more a patient knows about his ailment and its possible complications, the more reasons he has for anxiety. Doctors are themselves notoriously pessimistic patients, because they know altogether too much for their own comfort.

  Furthermore, people differ in their response to truth. Some patients, when told just how ill they are, fold up and quit. The confidence of such people in their own ability to get well has to be strengthened somehow, even by a whitish lie or two. The ways of nature are mysterious and many a sufferer gets well in the face of a dark outlook, simply by having the doctor tell him cheerily every day that he is getting better and better.

  There is, of course, another side to the argument, namely, that warning of a disaster may reduce its effects. If it is in the cards that a man’s heart is going to stop ticking in the near future, or if it is reasonably certain that he will be permanently crippled, he ought to know the truth sufficiently in advance to make what provision he can for his family.

  There is much to be said on both sides of this argument. My own feeling is that a man has inalienable rights to life, liberty and such knowledge as he can buy concerning the activities inside his person. It seems to me that if he asks for straight talk, the onus is on him, and he ought to get it.

  The whole thing boils down, I suppose, to the doctor’s judgment of the person with whom he is dealing. Some people respond to a
placebo, and some to a poke in the slats. And that is why I suspect that no mass-production system of medicine will ever work. For some things, one doctor is as good as another; and for other things, no doctor at all is best. For purposes of diagnosis there will be an increasing variety of ingeniously effective machines. But for the interpretation of this diagnostic material there must always be the fallible human mind. And for that ultimate mysterious harmony of causes that makes sick men well, there must be an intimately personal relationship—a singularly indefinable compound of art, science—and affection.

  Hippocrates had that idea, but then the microscope got invented; and there has been a tendency to believe that doctoring is just a matter of drugs and instruments. I do not share this belief. I think the good doctor is more than a mechanic. I think there is a touch of the priest in him.

  And with this irrelevant bit of philosophizing, I return to my narrative.

  The failure to find me allergic to anything but carp left me a little disheartened. Happily, however, I didn’t have an opportunity to brood. The Front Office packed me off to Mexico, and for a couple of months I had other things than my eyes to think about.

  In Mexico I had another demonstration of the fact that things are not always what they seem. I made the acquaintance of an aristocratic lady to whom I took an instant dislike. Quite literally, she looked down her nose at me. It seemed to me that her hauteur was almost insulting.

  Then, one afternoon, I sat next to her at the bullfight, and I observed that she looked down her nose even at the bulls. This astonished me so much that I made inquiries and found that the reason she looked the way she did was that she couldn’t look any other way. Her vision was obscured by scotomas—not unlike mine but in the center of the field.

  It was in Mexico, too, that I encountered a fine example of the lay-man’s naive faith in wonder-workers. I had been telling some friends of my trouble, and one of them excitedly gave me the name of an ophthalmologist who had originated in the southwest but was now practicing in New York. This man, I was assured, could cure anything. So I wrote his name and address in my notebook, and when I got home, hastened to ask my doctor if he had ever heard of the miracle man. “Oh, yes,” he replied. “He was one of my students. Quite a bright lad, too.”