THE SEWING MACHINE

Ida’s bed was the only one in the last alcove at the far end of the room of glass cases. Even so, her pangs made the patients in the rest of the ward uneasy. She tried not to scream, but she couldn’t help moaning when the spasms gripped her.

Her muffled cries gave Mrs. Thrum an excuse to scold. Peevishly she informed Ida that she was in the way, that she had no right whatever to that bed, that she was denying it to a brave soldier wounded in the service of his country. “If you think a single soul here is going to assist you,” said Mrs. Thrum, glowering down at Ida’s suffering face, “you are very much mistaken.”

“I’m sorry,” whispered Ida. “I’m very sorry.”

But it wasn’t true that she was denying a bed to a wounded soldier. The heavy influx after First and Second Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff and Antietam had mostly been cleared out, and most of the Gettysburg cases had long since been transferred, or else they had recovered or died. A few had been rushed out of the Patent Office to the Kalorama Hospital for smallpox cases.

Ida’s brother Eben was one of half a dozen men stricken with typhoid in a swampy camp only a few miles from Culpepper.

So now only a couple of hundred were left, including the long-term cases—gunshot wounds in the lungs, gangrenous compound fractures, resections after amputations, chronic diarrhea or simple debility.

There were many empty beds. The chief surgeon now had time to write up his more interesting cases.

CASE STUDY OF PATIENT 276

Gunshot wound of tibia and fibula, un-united comminuted fracture, leg swollen, offensive, filled with pus. Flap amputation at upper third of leg, stump closed with three stitches and wet strips of muslin … hemorrhage … tourniquet … hemorrhage … quinine and iron prescribed, cod-liver oil, egg-nog … hemorrhage, tightening of tourniquet, diarrhoea, administration of rhubarb powder, ipecacuanha and opium. Patient rallying, ten ounces of pus removed from thigh, injection of hydrochloric acid and laudanum … patient going about on crutches, discharged, paroled, sent south.

CASE STUDY OF PATIENT 1057

Gunshot wound of abdomen. Patient reports that much of the liquid food and drink he took after the injury continued to appear at the orifice of the wound.… An incision was made perpendicular to the walls of the belly, the bullet secured and removed.… Convalescent patient discharged and sent South, his wound improving, though still fistulous.

CASE STUDY OF PATIENT 1185

Diffuse Traumatic Aneurism; Wound of the Spinal Cord … Ligation of the Carotid … Death … Autopsy.

CASE STUDY OF PATIENT 2070

Sixteen-year-old with typhoid fever. Delousing called for on admission. Symptoms developed rapidly, chills and fever, abdominal rash, delirium.…

The surgeon had treated Patient 2070 since his admission to the hospital. When the boy’s sister appeared, he had given her the task of sponging her brother with cool water to reduce the fever.

Happily the boy now seemed to have passed the crisis, but his sister was in extremis. The surgeon felt utterly helpless. He was used to the groans and screams of wounded men, but Ida’s whimpering unmanned him. He knew all there was to know about battle wounds and the dangerous diseases contracted in crowded campgrounds and airless prisons, but he was unacquainted with female problems. About childbirth he knew nothing at all.

Of course Ida herself knew a good deal more than the surgeon, having assisted the midwife when her mother had been brought to bed with Alice. But now she was too humble and in too much anguish to make suggestions to Chief Surgeon Alexander Clock.

Gritting her teeth, she stared at the object in the glass case beside her bed, trying to understand how it worked. The little contraption was a model of Elias Howe’s sewing machine. As her pangs grew worse she forced herself to concentrate on the in-and-out trajectory of the thread. Gasping, she asked the doctor, “Oh, sir, how does it make a loop?”

But willy-nilly, babies always manage to be born. Shortly after five o’clock that afternoon, Mary Morgan Kelly’s great-grandfather emerged, howling, into the world.

But not before a tall woman wearing a rusty black bonnet and carrying a large canvas umbrella came storming up the aisle. It was Ida’s mother.