A Pearl is a Thing of Beauty

Knowledge is a physician’s chief therapeutic tool. Medical tomes bulge with information. The Internet opens doors to university libraries for the isolated medic. Experience hones “book learning” and acts as a sieve to filter pertinence from esoterica. Old Doc can be a special repository of such practical pearls of wisdom.

Old Doc Lyons was one of those country physicians who exuded humor and compassion. I never heard anyone say a harsh word about him. He was handsome in the mysterious way that ordinary people achieve comeliness when character lights features from within. He always wore a crisp, clean suit, a white shirt, a perky bow tie—a different one for every day of the month. His closet must have resembled a convention of butterflies.

One day I shared a break from hospital rounds with him. We sat over a cup of coffee in the small shop run by volunteers.

Old Doc Lyons had a reputation for predicting the gender of an unborn baby that bemused his colleagues and delighted his patients. This was decades before the advent of fancy technologies like ultrasound or amniocentesis. He regarded me with a twinkle when I asked him his secret.

He said, “Along about the time I first hear a heart tone from the baby, I make a production of telling Mama the sex of her tiny infant. To nail it down, I say, ‘I’m going to write it in the record so you can keep me honest.’ Time passes, baby arrives, and what do you know, it’s a boy!”

“‘But Doc,’ says new Mama, ‘you told me it was a girl.’ I look puzzled, then haul out my records to show her. ‘Nope, says here it will be a boy.’ And there it is, written months before. ‘You must have forgotten,’ I say. ‘Easy to do, in all the excitement.’”

It was my turn to say, “But... ”

He tapped me on the arm. “I write down the opposite of what I tell Mama. If I have said girl and it is, who asks to see the record? If I’m wrong, I can ‘prove’ my prediction, in writing.”

Old Doc Lyons tapped my arm again. “Here’s another pearl for you, young fellow. I have an absolutely infallible way of telling when a woman is carrying twins.” This again was before the days of ultrasound, when surprise twins were not unheard of. “Give up?” he chuckled. “Count them as they’re born.”

Old Doc Lyons grinned at me like the first kid awake on Easter Sunday. “We live and work in wondrous times,” he said. “Our ability to do abdominal surgery has been around for only about one-hundred-fifty years. Measure that against all the other times of mankind. Before, do you know how many people died of appendicitis alone?”

A trick question? How would anyone know?

“How many?”

“One-hundred percent of those unfortunate enough to contract the disease.”

I knew it was a trap! But hey, he grinned again, a Michelangelo of good humor. It was worth being a straight man. Then, his expressive face sagged into lines of melancholy.

“There is one fight I gave up years ago,” he said.

He cocked an eyebrow; I obliged and asked.

“That being?”

“How to protect people from their own folly.”

The grin was absent when he climbed to his feet. He waved from the doorway of the coffee shop.

He let me pay for the coffee. Maybe that was what he intended all along.