The Project Gutenberg EBook of "Speaking of Operations--", by Irvin S. Cobb
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Title: "Speaking of Operations--"
Author: Irvin S. Cobb
Posting Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #1890]
Release Date: September, 1999
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS--" ***
Produced by Kirk Pearson
"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS--"
by Irvin S. Cobb
Respectfully dedicated to two classes:
Those who have already been operated on
Those who have not yet been operated on
Now that the last belated bill for services professionally rendered has
been properly paid and properly receipted; now that the memory of the
event, like the mark of the stitches, has faded out from a vivid red to
a becoming pink shade; now that I pass a display of adhesive tape in
a drug-store window without flinching--I sit me down to write a little
piece about a certain matter--a small thing, but mine own--to wit, That
Operation.
For years I have noticed that persons who underwent pruning or
remodeling at the hands of a duly qualified surgeon, and survived, like
to talk about it afterward. In the event of their not surviving I have
no doubt they still liked to talk about it, but in a different locality.
Of all the readily available topics for use, whether among friends
or among strangers, an operation seems to be the handiest and most
dependable. It beats the Tariff, or Roosevelt, or Bryan, or when this
war is going to end, if ever, if you are a man talking to other men;
and it is more exciting even than the question of how Mrs. Vernon Castle
will wear her hair this season, if you are a woman talking to other
women.
For mixed companies a whale is one of the best and the easiest things to
talk about that I know of. In regard to whales and their peculiarities
you can make almost any assertion without fear of successful
contradiction. Nobody ever knows any more about them than you do. You
are not hampered by facts. If someone mentions the blubber of the whale
and you chime in and say it may be noticed for miles on a still day when
the large but emotional creature has been moved to tears by some great
sorrow coming into its life, everybody is bound to accept the statement.
For after all how few among us really know whether a distressed whale
sobs aloud or does so under its breath? Who, with any certainty, can
tell whether a mother whale hatches her own egg her own self or leaves
it on the sheltered bosom of a fjord to be incubated by the gentle
warmth of the midnight sun? The possibilities of the proposition for
purposes of informal debate, pro and con, are apparent at a glance.
The weather, of course, helps out amazingly when you are meeting people
for the first time, because there is nearly always more or less weather
going on somewhere and practically everybody has ideas about it. The
human breakfast is also a wonderfully good topic to start up during one
of those lulls. Try it yourself the next time the conversation seems
to drag. Just speak up in an offhand kind of way and say that you never
care much about breakfast--a slice of toast and a cup of weak tea start
you off properly for doing a hard day's work. You will be surprised to
note how things liven up and how eagerly all present join in. The lady
on your left feels that you should know she always takes two lumps of
sugar and nearly half cream, because she simply cannot abide hot milk,
no matter what the doctors say. The gentleman on your right will be
moved to confess he likes his eggs boiled for exactly three minutes,
no more and no less. Buckwheat cakes and sausage find a champion and
oatmeal rarely lacks a warm defender.
But after all, when all is said and done, the king of all topics is
operations. Sooner or later, wherever two or more are gathered together
it is reasonably certain that somebody will bring up an operation.
Until I passed through the experience of being operated on myself, I
never really realized what a precious conversational boon the subject
is, and how great a part it plays in our intercourse with our fellow
beings on this planet. To the teller it is enormously interesting, for
he is not only the hero of the tale but the rest of the cast and the
stage setting as well--the whole show, as they say; and if the listener
has had a similar experience--and who is there among us in these days
that has not taken a nap 'neath the shade of the old ether cone?--it
acquires a doubled value.
"Speaking of operations--" you say, just like that, even though
nobody present has spoken of them; and then you are off, with your new
acquaintance sitting on the edge of his chair, or hers as the case
may be and so frequently is, with hands clutched in polite but painful
restraint, gills working up and down with impatience, eyes brightened
with desire, tongue hung in the middle, waiting for you to pause to
catch your breath, so that he or she may break in with a few personal
recollections along the same line. From a mere conversation it resolves
itself into a symptom symposium, and a perfectly splendid time is had by
all.
If an operation is such a good thing to talk about, why isn't it a good
thing to write about, too? That is what I wish to know. Besides, I need
the money. Verily, one always needs the money when one has but recently
escaped from the ministering clutches of the modern hospital. Therefore
I write.
It all dates back to the fair, bright morning when I went to call on
a prominent practitioner here in New York, whom I shall denominate as
Doctor X. I had a pain. I had had it for days. It was not a dependable,
locatable pain, such as a tummyache or a toothache is, which you can
put your hand on; but an indefinite, unsettled, undecided kind of pain,
which went wandering about from place to place inside of me like a
strange ghost lost in Cudjo's Cave. I never knew until then what the
personal sensations of a haunted house are. If only the measly thing
could have made up its mind to settle down somewhere and start light
housekeeping I think should have been better satisfied. I never had such
an uneasy tenant. Alongside of it a woman with the moving fever would be
comparatively a fixed and stationary object.
Having always, therefore, enjoyed perfectly riotous and absolutely
unbridled health, never feeling weak and distressed unless dinner
happened to be ten or fifteen minutes late, I was green regarding
physicians and the ways of physicians. But I knew Doctor X slightly,
having met him last summer in one of his hours of ease in the grand
stand at a ball game, when he was expressing a desire to cut the
umpire's throat from ear to ear, free of charge; and I remembered his
name, and remembered, too, that he had impressed me at the time as being
a person of character and decision and scholarly attainments.
He wore whiskers. Somehow in my mind whiskers are ever associated
with medical skill. I presume this is a heritage of my youth, though I
believe others labor under the same impression.
As I look back it seems to me that in childhood's days all the doctors
in our town wore whiskers.
I recall one old doctor down there in Kentucky who was practically
lurking in ambush all the time. All he needed was a few decoys out in
front of him and a pump gun to be a duck blind. He carried his calomel
about with him in a fruit jar, and when there was cutting job he
stropped his scalpel on his bootleg.
You see, in those primitive times germs had not been invented yet, and
so he did not have to take any steps to avoid them. Now we know that
loose, luxuriant whiskers are unsanitary, because they make such fine
winter quarters for germs; so, though the doctors still wear whiskers,
they do not wear them wild and waving. In the profession bosky whiskers
are taboo; they must be landscaped. And since it is a recognized fact
that germs abhor orderliness and straight lines they now go elsewhere to
reside, and the doctor may still retain his traditional aspect and yet
be practically germproof. Doctor X was trimmed in accordance with the
ethics of the newer school. He had trellis whiskers. So I went to see
him at his offices in a fashionable district, on an expensive side
street.
Before reaching him I passed through the hands of a maid and a nurse,
each of whom spoke to me in a low, sorrowful tone of voice, which seemed
to indicate that there was very little hope.
I reached an inner room where Doctor X was. He looked me over, while I
described for him as best I could what seemed to be the matter with
me, and asked me a number of intimate questions touching on the lives,
works, characters and peculiarities of my ancestors; after which he
made me stand up in front of him and take my coat off, and he punched
me hither and yon with his forefinger. He also knocked repeatedly on my
breastbone with his knuckles, and each time, on doing this, would apply
his ear to my chest and listen intently for a spell, afterward shaking
his head in a disappointed way. Apparently there was nobody at home. For
quite a time he kept on knocking, but without getting any response.
He then took my temperature and fifteen dollars, and said it was an
interesting case--not unusual exactly, but interesting--and that it
called for an operation.
From the way my heart and other organs jumped inside of me at that
statement I knew at once that, no matter what he may have thought, the
premises were not unoccupied. Naturally I inquired how soon he meant
to operate. Personally I trusted there was no hurry about it. I was
perfectly willing to wait for several years, if necessary. He smiled at
my ignorance.
"I never operate," he said; "operating is entirely out of my line. I am
a diagnostician."
He was, too--I give him full credit for that. He was a good, keen, close
diagnostician. How did he know I had only fifteen dollars on me? You
did not have to tell this man what you had, or how much. He knew without
being told.
I asked whether he was acquainted with Doctor Y--Y being a person whom I
had met casually at a club to which I belong. Oh, yes, he said, he
knew Doctor Y. Y was a clever man, X said--very, very clever; but Y
specialized in the eyes, the ears, the nose and the throat. I gathered
from what Doctor X said that any time Doctor Y ventured below the thorax
he was out of bounds and liable to be penalized; and that if by any
chance he strayed down as far as the lungs he would call for help and
back out as rapidly as possible.
This was news to me. It would appear that these up-to-date practitioners
just go ahead and divide you up and partition you out among themselves
without saying anything to you about it. Your torso belongs to one man
and your legs are the exclusive property of his brother practitioner
down on the next block, and so on. You may belong to as many as half a
dozen specialists, most of whom, very possibly, are total strangers to
you, and yet never know a thing about it yourself.
It has rather the air of trespass--nay, more than that, it bears some
of the aspects of unlawful entry--but I suppose it is legal. Certainly,
judging by what I am able to learn, the system is being carried on
generally. So it must be ethical. Anything doctors do in a mass is
ethical. Almost anything they do singly and on individual responsibility
is unethical. Being ethical among doctors is practically the same thing
as being a Democrat in Texas or a Presbyterian in Scotland.
"Y will never do for you," said Doctor X, when I had rallied somewhat
from the shock of these disclosures. "I would suggest that you go to
Doctor Z, at such-and-such an address. You are exactly in Z's line. I'll
let him know that you are coming and when, and I'll send him down my
diagnosis."
So that same afternoon, the appointment having been made by telephone,
I went, full of quavery emotions, to Doctor Z's place. As soon as I was
inside his outer hallway, I realized that I was nearing the presence of
one highly distinguished in his profession.
A pussy-footed male attendant, in a livery that made him look like a
cross between a headwaiter and an undertaker's assistant, escorted me
through an anteroom into a reception-room, where a considerable number
of well-dressed men and women were sitting about in strained attitudes,
pretending to read magazines while they waited their turns, but in
reality furtively watching one another.
I sat down in a convenient chair, adhering fast to my hat and my
umbrella. They were the only friends I had there and I was determined
not to lose them without a struggle. On the wall were many colored
charts showing various portions of the human anatomy and what ailed
them. Directly in front of me was a very thrilling illustration,
evidently copied from an oil painting, of a liver in a bad state of
repair. I said to myself that if I had a liver like that one I should
keep it hidden from the public eye--I would never permit it to sit for
it's portrait. Still, there is no accounting for tastes. I know a man
who got his spleen back from the doctors and now keeps it in a bottle
of alcohol on the what-not in the parlor, as one of his most treasured
possessions, and sometimes shows it to visitors. He, however, is of a
very saving disposition.
Presently a lady secretary, who sat behind a roll-top desk in a corner
of the room, lifted a forefinger and silently beckoned me to her side. I
moved over and sat down by her; she took down my name and my age and my
weight and my height, and a number of other interesting facts that
will come in very handy should anyone ever be moved to write a complete
history of my early life. In common with Doctor X she shared
one attribute--she manifested a deep curiosity regarding my
forefathers--wanted to know all about them. I felt that this was
carrying the thing too far. I felt like saying to her:
"Miss or madam, so far as I know there is nothing the matter with my
ancestors of the second and third generations back, except that they
are dead. I am not here to seek medical assistance for a grandparent who
succumbed to disappointment that time when Samuel J. Tilden got counted
out, or for a great-grandparent who entered into Eternal Rest very
unexpectedly and in a manner entirely uncalled for as a result of being
an innocent bystander in one of those feuds that were so popular in my
native state immediately following the Mexican War. Leave my ancestors
alone. There is no need of your shaking my family tree in the belief
that a few overripe patients will fall out. I alone--I, me, myself--am
the present candidate!"
However, I refrained from making this protest audibly. I judged she was
only going according to the ritual; and as she had a printed card, with
blanks in it ready to be filled out with details regarding the remote
members of the family connection, I humored her along.
When I could not remember something she wished to know concerning an
ancestor I supplied her with thrilling details culled from the field of
fancy. When the card was entirely filled up she sent me back to my old
place to wait. I waited and waited, breeding fresh ailments all the
time. I had started out with one symptom; now if I had one I had a
million and a half. I could feel goose flesh sprouting out all over me.
If I had been taller I might have had more, but not otherwise. Such is
the power of the human imagination when the surroundings are favorable
to its development.
Time passed; to me it appeared that nearly all the time there was passed
and that we were getting along toward the shank-end of the Christian era
mighty fast. I was afraid my turn would come next and afraid it would
not. Perhaps you know this sensation. You get it at the dentist's, and
when you are on the list of after-dinner speakers at a large banquet,
and when you are waiting for the father of the Only Girl in the World
to make up his mind whether he is willing to try to endure you as a
son-in-law.
Then some more time passed.
One by one my companions, obeying a command, passed out through the door
at the back, vanishing out of my life forever. None of them returned. I
was vaguely wondering whether Doctor Z buried his dead on the premises
or had them removed by a secret passageway in the rear, when a young
woman in a nurse's costume tapped me on the shoulder from behind.
I jumped. She hid a compassionate smile with her hand and told me that
the doctor would see me now.
As I rose to follow her--still clinging with the drowning man's grip
of desperation to my hat and my umbrella--I was astonished to note by a
glance at the calendar on the wall that this was still the present date.
I thought it would be Thursday of next week at the very least.
Doctor Z also wore whiskers, carefully pointed up by an expert hedge
trimmer. He sat at his desk, surrounded by freewill offerings from
grateful patients and by glass cases containing other things he had
taken away from them when they were not in a condition to object. I
had expected, after all the preliminary ceremonies and delays, that
we should have a long skance together. Not so; not at all. The modern
expert in surgery charges as much for remembering your name between
visits as the family doctor used to expect for staying up all night with
you, but he does not waste any time when you are in his presence.
I was about to find that out. And a little later on I was to find out a
lot of other things; in fact, that whole week was of immense educational
value to me.
I presume it was because he stood high in his profession, and was almost
constantly engaged in going into the best society that Doctor Z did not
appear to be the least bit excited over my having picked him out to
look into me. In the most perfunctory manner he shook the hand that has
shaken the hands of Jess Willard, George M. Cohan and Henry Ford, and
bade me be seated in a chair which was drawn up in a strong light, where
he might gaze directly at me as we conversed and so get the full values
of the composition. But if I was a treat for him to look at he concealed
his feelings very effectually.
He certainly had his emotions under splendid control. But then,
of course, you must remember that he probably had traveled about
extensively and was used to sight-seeing.
From this point on everything passed off in a most businesslike manner.
He reached into a filing cabinet and took out an exhibit, which I
recognized as the same one his secretary had filled out in the early
part of the century. So I was already in the card-index class. Then
briefly he looked over the manifest that Doctor X had sent him. It
may not have been a manifest--it may have been an invoice or a bill of
lading. Anyhow I was in the assignee's hands. I could only hope it would
not eventually become necessary to call in a receiver. Then he spoke:
"Yes, yes-yes," he said; "yes-yes-yes! Operation required. Small
matter--hum, hum! Let's see--this is Tuesday? Quite so. Do it Friday!
Friday at"--he glanced toward a scribbled pad of engagement dates at his
elbow--"Friday at seven A. M. No, make it seven-fifteen. Have important
tumor case at seven. St. Germicide's Hospital. You know the place--up on
Umpty-umph Street. Go' day! Miss Whoziz, call next visitor."
And before I realized that practically the whole affair had been settled
I was outside the consultation-room in a small private hall, and the
secretary was telling me further details would be conveyed to me by
mail. I went home in a dazed state. For the first time I was beginning
to learn something about an industry in which heretofore I had never
been interested. Especially was I struck by the difference now revealed
to me in the preliminary stages of the surgeons' business as compared
with their fellow experts in the allied cutting trades--tailors, for
instance, not to mention barbers. Every barber, you know, used to be a
surgeon, only he spelled it chirurgeon. Since then the two professions
have drifted far apart. Even a half-witted barber--the kind who always
has the first chair as you come into the shop--can easily spend ten
minutes of your time thinking of things he thinks you should have and
mentioning them to you one by one, whereas any good, live surgeon knows
what you have almost instantly.
As for the tailor--consider how wearisome are his methods when you
parallel them alongside the tremendous advances in this direction made
by the surgeon--how cumbersome and old-fashioned and tedious! Why, an
experienced surgeon has you all apart in half the time the tailor takes
up in deciding whether the vest shall fasten with five buttons or six.
Our own domestic tailors are bad enough in this regard and the Old World
tailors are even worse.
I remember a German tailor in Aix-la-Chapelle in the fall of 1914 who
undertook to build for me a suit suitable for visiting the battle lines
informally. He was the most literary tailor I ever met anywhere. He
would drape the material over my person and then take a piece of chalk
and write quite a nice long piece on me. Then he would rub it out and
write it all over again, but more fully. He kept this up at intervals of
every other day until he had writer's cramp. After that he used pins. He
would pin the seams together, uttering little soothing, clucking sounds
in German whenever a pin went through the goods and into me. The German
cluck is not so soothing as the cluck of the English-speaking peoples, I
find.
At the end of two long and trying weeks, which wore both of us down
noticeably, he had the job done. It was not an unqualified success. He
regarded is as a suit of clothes, but I knew better; it was a set of
slip covers, and if only I had been a two-seated runabout it would have
proved a perfect fit, I am sure; but I am a single-seated design and it
did not answer. I wore it to the war because I had nothing else to wear
that would stamp me as a regular war correspondent, except, of course,
my wrist watch; but I shall not wear it to another war. War is terrible
enough already; and, besides, I have parted with it. On my way home
through Holland I gave that suit to a couple of poor Belgian refugees,
and I presume they are still wearing it.
So far as I have been able to observe, the surgeons and the tailors of
these times share but one common instinct: If you go to a new surgeon or
to a new tailor he is morally certain, after looking you over, that
the last surgeon you had or the last tailor, did not do your cutting
properly. There, however, is where the resemblance ends. The tailor, as
I remarked in effect just now, wants an hour at least in which to decide
how he may best cover up and disguise the irregularities of the human
form; in much less time than that the surgeon has completely altered the
form itself.
With the surgeon it is very much as it is with those learned men
who write those large, impressive works of reference which should be
permanently in every library, and which we are forever buying from an
agent because we are so passionately addicted to payments. If the thing
he seeks does not appear in the contents proper he knows exactly where
to look for it. "See appendix," says the historian to you in a footnote.
"See appendix," says the surgeon to himself, the while humming a cheery
refrain. And so he does.
Well, I went home. This was Tuesday and the operation was not to be
performed until the coming Friday. By Wednesday I had calmed down
considerably. By Thursday morning I was practically normal again as
regards my nerves. You will understand that I was still in a blissful
state of ignorance concerning the actual methods of the surgical
profession as exemplified by its leading exponents of today. The
knowledge I have touched on in the pages immediately preceding was to
come to me later.
Likewise Doctor Z's manner had been deceiving. It could not be that he
meant to carve me to any really noticeable extent--his attitude had been
entirely too casual. At our house carving is a very serious matter. Any
time I take the head of the table and start in to carve it is fitting
women and children get to a place of safety, and onlookers should get
under the table. When we first began housekeeping and gave our first
small dinner-party we had a brace of ducks cooked in honor of the
company, and I, as host, undertook to carve them. I never knew until
then that a duck was built like a watch--that his works were inclosed in
a burglarproof case. Without the use of dynamite the Red Leary-O'Brien
gang could not have broken into those ducks. I thought so then and I
think so yet. Years have passed since then, but I may state that even
now, when there are guests for dinner, we do not have ducks. Unless
somebody else is going to carve, we have liver.
I mention this fact in passing because it shows that I had learned to
revere carving as one of the higher arts, and one not to be approached
except in a spirit of due appreciation of the magnitude of the
undertaking, and after proper consideration and thought and reflection,
and all that sort of thing.
If this were true as regards a mere duck, why not all the more so as
regards the carving of a person of whom I am so very fond as I am of
myself? Thus I reasoned. And finally, had not Doctor Z spoken of the
coming operation as a small matter? Well then?
Thursday at noon I received from Doctor Z's secretary a note stating
that arrangements had been made for my admission into St. Germicide that
same evening and that I was to spend the night there. This hardly seemed
necessary. Still, the tone of the note appeared to indicate that the
hospital authorities particularly wished to have me for an overnight
guest; and as I reflected that probably the poor things had few enough
bright spots in their busy lives, I decided I would humor them along and
gladden the occasion with my presence from dinner-time on.
About eight o'clock I strolled in very jauntily. In my mind I had the
whole programme mapped out. I would stay at the hospital for, say, two
days following the operation--or, at most, three. Then I must be up and
away. I had a good deal of work to do and a number of people to see on
important business, and I could not really afford to waste more than a
weekend on the staff of St. Germicide's. After Monday they must look to
their own devices for social entertainment. That was my idea. Now when
I look back on it I laugh, but it is a hollow laugh and there is no real
merriment in it.
Indeed, almost from the moment of my entrance little things began
to come up that were calculated to have a depressing effect on one's
spirits. Downstairs a serious-looking lady met me and entered in a book
a number of salient facts regarding my personality which the previous
investigators had somehow overlooked. There is a lot of bookkeeping
about an operation. This detail attended to, a young man, dressed in
white garments and wearing an expression that stamped him as one who had
suffered a recent deep bereavement came and relieved me of my hand bag
and escorted me upstairs.
As we passed through the upper corridors I had my first introduction
to the hospital smell, which is a smell compounded of iodoform, ether,
gruel, and something boiling. All hospitals have it, I understand. In
time you get used to it, but you never really care for it.
The young man led me into a small room tastefully decorated with four
walls, a floor, a ceiling, a window sill and a window, a door and a
doorsill, and a bed and a chair. He told me to go to bed. I did not want
to go to bed--it was not my regular bedtime--but he made a point of it,
and I judged it was according to regulations; so I undressed and put on
my night clothes and crawled in. He left me, taking my other clothes and
my shoes with him, but I was not allowed to get lonely.
A little later a ward surgeon appeared, to put a few inquiries of a
pointed and personal nature. He particularly desired to know what my
trouble was. I explained to him that I couldn't tell him--he would have
to see Doctor X or Doctor Z; they probably knew, but were keeping it a
secret between themselves.
The answer apparently satisfied him, because immediately after that he
made me sign a paper in which I assumed all responsibility for what was
to take place the next morning.
This did not seem exactly fair. As I pointed out to him, it was the
surgeon's affair, not mine; and if the surgeon made a mistake the joke
would be on him and not on me, because in that case I would not be here
anyhow. But I signed, as requested, on the dotted line, and he departed.
After that, at intervals, the chief house surgeon dropped in, without
knocking, and the head nurse came, and an interne or so, and a ward
nurse, and the special nurse who was to have direct charge of me. It
dawned on me that I was not having any more privacy in that hospital
than a goldfish.
About eleven o'clock an orderly came, and, without consulting my wishes
in the matter, he undressed me until I could have passed almost anywhere
for September Morn's father, and gave me a clean shave, twice over, on
one of my most prominent plane surfaces. I must confess I enjoyed that
part of it. So far as I am able to recall, it was the only shave I
have ever had where the operator did not spray me with cheap perfumery
afterward and then try to sell me a bottle of hair tonic.
Having shaved me, the young man did me up amidships in a neat cloth
parcel, took his kit under his arm and went away.
It occurred to me that, considering the trivial nature of the case, a
good deal of fuss was being made over me by persons who could have no
personal concern in the matter whatsoever. This thought recurred to me
frequently as I lay there all tied in a bundle like a week's washing. I
did not feel quite so uppish as I had felt. Why was everybody picking on
me?
Anon I slept, but dreamed fitfully. I dreamed that a whole flock of
surgeons came to my bedside and charted me out in sections, like one
of those diagram pictures you see of a beef in the Handy Compendium of
Universal Knowledge, showing the various cuts and the butcher's pet name
for each cut. Each man took his favorite joint and carried it away,
and when they were all gone I was merely a recent site, full of
reverberating echoes and nothing else.
I have had happier dreams in my time; this was not the kind of dream I
should have selected had the choice been left to me.
When I woke the young sun was shining in at the window, and an
orderly--not the orderly who had shaved me, but another one--was there
in my room and my nurse was waiting outside the door. The orderly
dressed me in a quaint suit of pyjamas cut on the half shell and
buttoning stylishly in the back, princesse mode. Then he rolled in a
flat litter on wheels and stretched me on it, and covered me up with a
white tablecloth, just as though I had been cold Sunday-night supper,
and we started for the operating-room at the top of the building; but
before we started I lit a large black cigar, as Gen. U. S. Grant used to
do when he went into battle. I wished by this to show how indifferent I
was. Maybe he fooled somebody, but I do not believe I possess the same
powers of simulation that Grant had. He must have been a very remarkable
man--Grant must.
The orderly and the nurse trundled me out into the hall and loaded me
into an elevator, which was to carry us up to the top of the hospital.
Several other nurses were already in the elevator. As we came aboard one
of them remarked that it was a fine day. A fine day for what? She did
not finish the sentence.
Everybody wore a serious look. Inside of myself I felt pretty serious
too--serious enough for ten or twelve. I had meant to fling off several
very bright, spontaneous quips on the way to the table. I thought them
out in advance, but now, somehow, none of them seemed appropriate.
Instinctively, as it were, I felt that humor was out of place here.
I never knew an elevator to progress from the third floor of a building
to the ninth with such celerity as this one on which we were traveling
progressed. Personally I was in no mood for haste. If there was anyone
else in all that great hospital who was in a particular hurry to be
operated on I was perfectly willing to wait. But alas, no! The mechanism
of the elevator was in perfect order--entirely too perfect. No accident
of any character whatsoever befell us en route, no dropping back into
the basement with a low, grateful thud; no hitch; no delay of any kind.
We were certainly out of luck that trip. The demon of a joyrider who
operated the accursed device jerked a lever and up we soared at a
distressingly high rate of speed. If I could have had my way about that
youth he would have been arrested for speeding.
Now we were there! They rolled into a large room, all white, with a
rounded ceiling like the inside of an egg. Right away I knew what the
feelings of a poor, lonely little yolk are when the spoon begins to chip
the shell. If I had not been so busy feeling sorry for myself I think I
might have developed quite an active sympathy for yolks.
My impression had been that this was to be in the nature of a private
affair, without invitations. I was astonished to note that quite a crowd
had assembled for the opening exercises. From his attire and general
deportment I judged that Doctor Z was going to be the master of the
revels, he being attired appropriately in a white domino, with rubber
gloves and a fancy cap of crash toweling. There were present, also,
my diagnostic friend, Doctor X, likewise in fancy-dress costume, and a
surgeon I had never met. From what I could gather he was going over the
course behind Doctor Z to replace the divots.
And there was an interne in the background, playing caddy, as it were,
and a head nurse, who was going to keep the score, and two other nurses,
who were going to help her keep it. I only hoped that they would show no
partiality, but be as fair to me as they were to Doctor Z, and that he
would go round in par.
So they placed me right where my eyes might rest on a large wall cabinet
full of very shiny-looking tools; and they took my cigar away from me
and folded my hands on the wide bowknot of my sash. Then they put a
cloth dingus over my face and a voice of authority told me to breathe.
That advice, however, was superfluous and might just as well have
been omitted, for such was my purpose anyhow. Ever since I can recall
anything at all, breathing has been a regular habit with me. So I
breathed. And, at that, a bottle of highly charged sarsaparilla exploded
somewhere in the immediate vicinity and most of its contents went up my
nose.
I started to tell them that somebody had been fooling with their ether
and adulterating it, and that if they thought they could send me off to
sleep with soda pop they were making the mistake of their lives, because
it just naturally could not be done; but for some reason or other
I decided to put off speaking about the matter for a few minutes. I
breathed again--again--agai----
I was going away from there. I was in a large gas balloon, soaring up
into the clouds. How pleasant!... No, by Jove! I was not in a balloon--I
myself was the balloon, which was not quite so pleasant. Besides, Doctor
Z was going along as a passenger; and as we traveled up and up he kept
jabbing me in the midriff with the ferrule of a large umbrella which
he had brought along with him in case of rain. He jabbed me harder and
harder. I remonstrated with him. I told him I was a bit tender in that
locality and the ferrule of his umbrella was sharp. He would not listen.
He kept on jabbing me.
Something broke! We started back down to earth. We fell faster and
faster. We fell nine miles, and after that I began to get used to it.
Then I saw the earth beneath and it was rising up to meet us.
A town was below--a town that grew larger and larger as we neared it.
I could make out the bonded indebtedness, and the Carnegie Library,
and the moving-picture palaces, and the new dancing parlor, and other
principal points of interest.
At the rate we were falling we were certainly going to make an awful
splatter in that town when we hit. I was sorry for the street-cleaning
department.
We fell another half mile or so. A spire was sticking up into the sky
directly beneath us, like a spear, to impale us. By a supreme effort I
twisted out of the way of that spire, only to strike squarely on top of
the roof of a greenhouse back of the parsonage, next door. We crashed
through it with a perfectly terrific clatter of breaking glass and
landed in a bed of white flowers, all soft and downy, like feathers.
And then Doctor Z stood up and combed the debris out of his whiskers
and remarked that, taking it by and large, it had been one of the
pleasantest little outings he had enjoyed in the entire course of his
practice. He said that as a patient I was fair, but as a balloon I was
immense. He asked me whether I had seen anything of his umbrella and
began looking round for it. I tried to help him look, but I was too
tired to exert myself much. I told him I believed I would take a little
nap.
I opened a dizzy eye part way. So this was heaven--this white expanse
that swung and swam before my languid gaze? No, it could not be--it did
not smell like heaven. It smelled like a hospital. It was a hospital. It
was my hospital. My nurse was bending over me and I caught a faint whiff
of the starch in the front of her crisp blue blouse. She was two-headed
for the moment, but that was a mere detail. She settled a pillow under
my head and told me to lie quiet.
I meant to lie quiet; I did not have to be told. I wanted to lie quiet
and hurt. I was hurty from head to toe and back again, and crosswise and
cater-cornered. I hurt diagonally and lengthwise and on the bias. I had
a taste in my mouth like a bird-and-animal store. And empty! It seemed
to me those doctors had not left anything inside of me except the
acoustics. Well, there was a mite of consolation there. If the
overhauling had been as thorough as I had reason to believe it was from
my present sensations, I need never fear catching anything again so long
as I lived, except possibly dandruff.
I waved the nurse away. I craved solitude. I desired only to lie there
in that bed and hurt--which I did.
I had said beforehand I meant to stay in St. Germicide's for two or
three days only. It is when I look back on that resolution I emit the
hollow laugh elsewhere referred to. For exactly four weeks I was flat
on my back. I know now how excessively wearied a man can get of his own
back, how tired of it, how bored with it! And after that another two
weeks elapsed before my legs became the same dependable pair of legs I
had known in the past.
I did not want to eat at first, and when I did begin to want to they
would not let me. If I felt sort of peckish they let me suck a
little glass thermometer, but there is not much nourishment really in
thermometers. And for entertainment, to wile the dragging hours away,
I could count the cracks in the ceiling and read my temperature chart,
which was a good deal like Red Ames' batting average for the past
season--ranging from ninety-nine to one hundred and four.
Also, through daily conversations with my nurse and with the surgeons
who dropped in from time to time to have a look at me, I learned, as I
lay there, a great deal about the medical profession--that is, a
great deal for a layman--and what I learned filled me with an abiding
admiration for it, both as a science and as a business. This surely is
one profession which ever keeps its face to the front. Burying its past
mistakes and forgetting them as speedily as possible, it pushes straight
forward into fresh fields and fresh patients, always hopeful of what
the future may bring in the way of newly discovered and highly expensive
ailments. As we look backward upon the centuries we are astonished
by its advancement. I did a good deal of looking backwards upon the
centuries during my sojourn at St. Germicide's.
Take the Middle Ages now--the period when a barber and a surgeon were
one and the same. If a man made a failure as a barber he turned his
talents to surgery. Surgeons in those times were a husky breed. I judge
they worked by the day instead of by piecework; anyhow the records show
they were very fond of experiments where somebody else furnished the raw
material.
When there came a resounding knock at the tradesman's entrance of the
moated grange, the lord of the manor, looking over the portcullis and
seeing a lusty wight standing down below, in a leather apron, with his
sleeves rolled up and a kit of soldering tools under his arm, didn't
know until he made inquiry whether the gentle stranger had come to mend
the drain or remove the cook's leg.
A little later along, when gunpowder had come into general use as a
humanizing factor of civilization, surgeons treated a gunshot wound by
pouring boiling lard into it, which I would say was calculated to take
the victim's mind off his wound and give him something else to think
about--for the time being, anyhow. I assume the notion of applying a
mustard plaster outside one's stomach when one has a pain inside one's
stomach is based on the same principle.
However, one doesn't have to go clear back to medieval times to note the
radical differences in the plan of treating human ailments. A great
many persons who are still living can remember when the doctors were
not nearly so numerous as they are now. I, for one, would be the last to
reverse the sentence and say that because the doctors were not nearly
so numerous then as they are now, those persons are still living so
numerously.
In the spring of the year, when the sap flowed and the birds mated, the
sturdy farmer felt that he was due to have something the matter with
him, too. So he would ride into the country-seat and get an almanac.
Doubtless the reader, if country raised, has seen copies of this popular
work. On the outside cover, which was dark blue in color, there was
a picture of a person whose stomach was sliced four ways, like a
twenty-cent pie, and then folded back neatly, thus exposing his entire
interior arrangements to the gaze of the casual observer. However, this
party, judging by his picture, did not appear to be suffering. He did
not even seem to fear that he might catch cold from standing there in
his own draught. He was gazing off into space in an absent-minded kind
of way, apparently not aware that anything was wrong with him; and on
all sides he was surrounded by interesting exhibits, such as a crab, and
a scorpion, and a goat, and a chap with a bow and arrow--and one thing
and another.
Such was the main design of the cover, while the contents were made up
of recognized and standard varieties in the line of jokes and the line
of diseases which alternated, with first a favorite joke and then a
favorite disease. The author who wrote the descriptions of the diseases
was one of the most convincing writers that ever lived anywhere. As a
realist he had no superiors among those using our language as a vehicle
for the expression of thought. He was a wonder. If a person wasn't
particular about what ailed him he could read any page at random and
have one specific disease. Or he could read the whole book through and
have them all, in their most advanced stages. Then the only thing that
could save him was a large dollar bottle.
Again, in attacks of the breakbone ague or malaria it was customary
to call in a local practitioner, generally an elderly lady of the
neighborhood who had none of these latter-day prejudices regarding the
use of tobacco by the gentler sex. One whom I distantly recall, among
childhood's happy memories, carried this liberal-mindedness to a point
where she not only dipped snuff and smoked a cob pipe, but sometimes
chewed a little natural leaf. This lady, on being called in, would brew
up a large caldron of medicinal roots and barks and sprouts and things;
and then she would deluge the interior of the sufferer with a large
gourdful of this pleasing mixture at regular intervals. It was
efficacious, too. The inundated person either got well or else he
drowned from the inside. Rocking the patient was almost as dangerous a
pastime as rocking the boat. This also helps to explain, I think, why so
many of our forebears had floating kidneys. There was nothing else for a
kidney to do.
By the time I attained to long trousers, people in our town mainly had
outgrown the unlicensed expert and were depending more and more upon the
old-fashioned family doctor--the one with the whisker-jungle--who drove
about in a gig, accompanied by a haunting aroma of iodoform and carrying
his calomel with him in bulk.
He probably owned a secret calomel mine of his own. He must have;
otherwise he could never have afforded to be so generous with it. He
also had other medicines with him, all of them being selected on the
principle that unless a drug tasted like the very dickens it couldn't
possibly do you any good. At all hours of the day and night he was to
be seen going to and fro, distributing nuggets from his private lode. He
went to bed with his trousers and his hat on, I think, and there was a
general belief that his old mare slept between the shafts of the gig,
with the bridle shoved up on her forehead.
It has been only a few years since the oldtime general practitioner was
everywhere. Just look round and see now how the system has changed! If
your liver begins to misconduct itself the first thought of the modern
operator is to cut it out and hide it some place where you can't find
it. The oldtimer would have bombarded it with a large brunette pill
about the size and color of a damson plum. Or he might put you on a
diet of molasses seasoned to taste with blue mass and quinine and other
attractive condiments. Likewise, in the spring of the year he frequently
anointed the young of the species with a mixture of mutton suet and
asafetida. This treatment had an effect that was distinctly depressing
upon the growing boy. It militated against his popularity. It forced him
to seek his pleasures outdoors, and a good distance outdoors at that.
It was very hard for a boy, however naturally attractive he might be,
to retain his popularity at the fireside circle when coated with
mutton suet and asafetida and then taken into a warm room. He attracted
attention which he did not court and which was distasteful to him.
Keeping quiet did not seem to help him any. Even if they had been
blindfolded others would still have felt his presence. A civit-cat
suffers from the same drawbacks in a social way, but the advantage to
the civit-cat is that as a general thing it associates only with other
civit-cats.
Except in the country the old-time, catch-as-catch-can general
practitioner appears to be dying out. In the city one finds him
occasionally, playing a limit game in an office on a back street--two
dollars to come in, five to call; but the tendency of the day is toward
specialists. Hence the expert who treats you for just one particular
thing With a pain in your chest, say, you go to a chest specialist. So
long as he can keep the trouble confined to your chest, all well and
good. If it slips down or slides up he tries to coax it back to the
reservation. If it refuses to do so, he bids it an affectionate adieu,
makes a dotted mark on you to show where he left off, collects his
bill and regretfully turns you over to a stomach specialist or a throat
specialist, depending on the direction in which the trouble was headed
when last seen.
Or, perhaps the specialist to whom you take your custom is an advocate
of an immediate operation for such cases as yours and all others. I
may be unduly sensitive on account of having recently emerged from the
surgeon's hands, but it strikes me now that there are an awful lot of
doctors who take one brief glance at a person who is complaining, and
say to themselves that here is something that ought to be looked into
right away--and immediately open a bag and start picking out the proper
utensils. You go into a doctor's office and tell him you do not feel
the best in the world--and he gives you a look and excuses himself, and
steps into the next room and begins greasing a saw.
Mind you, in these casual observations as compiled by me while bedfast
and here given utterance, I am not seeking to disparage possibly the
noblest of professions. Lately I have owed much to it. I am strictly on
the doctor's side. He is with us when we come into the world and with
us when we go out of it, oftentimes lending a helping hand on both
occasions. Anyway, our sympathies should especially go out to the
medical profession at this particular time when the anti-vivisectionists
are railing so loudly against the doctors. The anti-vivisection crusade
has enlisted widely different classes in the community, including many
lovers of our dumb-animal pets--and aren't some of them the dumbest
things you ever saw!--especially chow dogs and love birds.
I will admit there is something to be said on both sides of the
argument. This dissecting of live subjects may have been carried to
extremes on occasions. When I read in the medical journals that
the eminent Doctor Somebody succeeded in transferring the interior
department of a pelican to a pointer pup, and vice versa with such
success that the pup drowned while diving for minnows, and the pelican
went out in the back yard and barked himself to death baying at the
moon, I am interested naturally; but, possibly because of my ignorance,
I fail to see wherein the treatment of infantile paralysis has been
materially advanced. On the other hand I would rather the kind and
gentle Belgian hare should be offered up as a sacrifice upon the
operating table and leave behind him a large family of little Belgian
heirs and heiresses--dependent upon the charity of a cruel world--than
that I should have something painful which can be avoided through making
him a martyr. I would rather any white rabbit on earth should have the
Asiatic cholera twice than that I should have it just once. These are my
sincere convictions, and I will not attempt to disguise them.
Thanks too, to medical science we know about germs and serums and diets
and all that. Our less fortunate ancestors didn't know about them. They
were befogged in ignorance. As recently as the generation immediately
preceding ours people were unacquainted with the simplest rules of
hygiene. They didn't care whether the housefly wiped his feet before
he came into the house or not. The gentleman with the drooping,
cream-separator mustache was at perfect liberty to use the common
drinking cup on the railroad train. The appendix lurked in its
snug retreat, undisturbed by the prying fingers of curiosity. The
fever-bearing skeeter buzzed and flitted, stinging where he pleased. The
germ theory was unfathomed. Suitable food for an invalid was anything
the invalid could afford to buy. Fresh air, and more especially fresh
night air, was regarded as dangerous, and people hermetically sealed
themselves in before retiring. Not daily as at present was the world
gladdened by the tidings that science had unearthed some new and
particularly unpleasant disease. It never occurred to a mother that she
should sterilize the slipper before spanking her offspring. Babies were
not reared antiseptically, but just so. Nobody was aware of microbes.
In short, our sires and our grandsires abode in the midst of perils.
They were surrounded on all sides by things that are immediately fatal
to the human system. Not a single one of them had a right to pass his
second birthday. In the light of what we know, we realize that by now
this world should be but a barren waste dotted at frequent intervals
with large graveyards and populated only by a few dispossessed and
hungry bacteria, hanging over the cemetery fence singing: Driven From
Home!
In the conditions generally prevalent up to twenty-five years ago, most
of us never had any license, really, to be born at all. Yet look how
many of us are now here. In this age of research I hesitate to attempt
to account for it, except on the entirely unscientific theory that what
you don't know doesn't hurt you. Doubtless a physician could give you a
better explanation, but his would cost you more than mine has.
But we digress. Let us get back to our main subject, which is myself. I
shall never forget my first real meal in that hospital. There was quite
a good deal of talk about it beforehand. My nurse kept telling me that
on the next day the doctor had promised I might have something to eat.
I could hardly wait. I had visions of a tenderloin steak smothered in
fried onions, and some French-fried potatoes, and a tall table-limit
stack of wheat cakes, and a few other incidental comfits and kickshaws.
I could hardly wait for that meal.
The next day came and she brought it to me, and I partook thereof. It
was the white of an egg. For dessert I licked a stamp; but this I did
clandestinely and by stealth, without saying anything about it to her. I
was not supposed to have any sweets.
On the occasion of the next feast the diet was varied. I had a sip of
one of those fermented milk products. You probably know the sort of
thing I mean. Even before you've swallowed it, it tastes as though it
had already disagreed with you. The nurse said this food was predigested
but did not tell me by whom. Nor did I ask her. I started to, but
thought better of it. Sometimes one is all the happier for not knowing
too much.
A little later on, seeing that I had not suffered an attack of
indigestion from this debauch, they gave me junket. In the dictionary I
have looked up the definitions of junket. I quote:
JUNKET, v. I. t. To entertain by feasting; regale. II. i. To
give or take part in an entertainment or excursion; feast in
company; picnic; revel.
JUNKET, n. A merry feast or excursion; picnic.
When the author of a dictionary tries to be frivolous he only succeeds
in making himself appear foolish.
I know not how it may be in the world at large, but in a hospital,
junket is a custard that by some subtle process has been denuded of
those ingredients which make a custard fascinating and exciting. It
tastes as though the eggs, which form its underlying basis, had been
laid in a fit of pique by a hen that was severely upset at the time.
Hereafter when the junket is passed round somebody else may have my
share. I'll stick to the mince pie a la mode. And the first cigar of my
convalescence--ah, that, too, abides as a vivid memory! Dropping in
one morning to replace the wrappings Doctor Z said I might smoke in
moderation. So the nurse brought me a cigar, and I lit it and took one
deep puff; but only one. I laid it aside. I said to the nurse:
"A mistake has been made here. I do not want a cooking cigar, you
understand. I desire a cigar for personal use. This one is full of herbs
and simples, I think. It suggests a New England boiled dinner, and not a
very good New England boiled dinner at that. Let us try again."
She brought another cigar. It was not satisfactory either. Then she
showed me the box--an orthodox box containing cigars of a recognized and
previously dependable brand. I could only conclude that a root-and-herb
doctor had bought an interest in the business and was introducing his
own pet notions into the formula.
But came a day--as the fancy writers say when they wish to convey the
impression that a day has come, but hate to do it in a commonplace
manner--came a day when my cigar tasted as a cigar should taste and food
had the proper relish to it; and my appetite came back again and found
the old home place not so greatly changed after all.
And then shortly thereafter came another day, when I, all replete
with expensive stitches, might drape the customary habiliments of
civilization about my attenuated frame and go forth to mingle with my
fellow beings. I have been mingling pretty steadily ever since, for now
I have something to talk about--a topic good for any company; congenial,
an absorbing topic.
I can spot a brother member a block away. I hasten up to him and give
him the grand hailing sign of the order. He opens his mouth to speak,
but I beat him to it.
"Speaking of operations--" I say. And then I'm off. Believe me, it's the
life!
End of Project Gutenberg's "Speaking of Operations--", by Irvin S. Cobb
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