THE patients who came from the ends of the earth to consult Dr.
Leonard Gillespie had been drawn to him by his fame as a
miracle-worker or sent by baffled physicians of every country. Now,
for three days, they had been brought by old Conover, the negro who
presided over the waiting-room, not into the stormy presence of the
great man, but to the young intern, James Kildare. He was neither
very big nor very noisy, and as a rule he failed to impress the
people who had been drawn by a famous name; only a small minority
saw in him that penetrating flash, that swiftly working instinct
which seems almost foreknowledge and is characteristic of the born
diagnostician. Kildare, accepting the great post almost guiltily,
like a thief on a throne, nevertheless worked three days before he
was completely stumped. Many a time when he had reached the end of
his own trail of knowledge, he looked up in despair at the closely
printed tomes which filled the walls of Gillespie's library, and as
he stared, some page flickered in his memory, or the voice of
Gillespie came back to hint at the clue to the mystery. So for
three days he had not been guilty of a single gross error while the
continued stream of feet came in over the blurred pattern of the
rug where tens of thousands had stood before them. Instinct helped
him through many a pinch. The great Gillespie himself used to say:
"The mind comprises nine-tenths of our being, and therefore a
doctor who isn't part faith-healer is no damned good. A doctor who
lacks human understanding is like a coal miner without a lamp on
his hat or a pick in his hand." Beyond a natural gift and the
teaching of Gillespie, that human understanding helped Kildare
through the first three days. Gillespie, in the meantime, was
giving himself up to the work on his laboratory experiment. On the
fourth day Kildare at last reached his impasse.
He sat with the laboratory reports in his hand, sweating a little
as he stared at the boy, but what he really saw was the mother in
the background. The lad was twelve, neatly turned out from the
shine of his shoes to the gloves in his hand. In spite of his worn,
sallow face there was still a fire in him, gradually dying. When
his courage failed, he would fail also. In comparison the mother
was like a kitchen slavey sent out with the young master. Rain had
shrunk her cheap jacket until the sleeves were inches above the
wrists and the bottom of it flared out before it reached her hips.
She had a round, common face. The pain she had endured gave her the
only distinction. Long-continued trouble had tumbled in shadowy
lines and hollows of anxiety. The silence of Kildare as he stared
at her boy frightened her to the heart, but she tried to wheedle
the bad moment away.
"It's God's mercy that we've got big hospitals,
doctor," she said. "Young or old, there ain't a chance that you
could go wrong on a case with all them wheels turning and turning
to set you right; not when you got a whole army to lend you a
hand."
Kildare tasted the bitter truth for a moment in his throat before
he spoke it.
"I'm afraid that I can't help you," he said.
Something stirred, like a whisper of wind, in the corner of the
room behind him. That would be Mary Lamont. She was an excellent
nurse and steady as a clock in emergencies, but the hopeless cases
broke her down. He could feel her now like an extra burden on his
mind. Then something struck the floor with a soft shock. Mrs. Casey
had dropped her handbag. The boy, stooping quickly, picked it up.
He touched her with his hand.
"Steady, dear!" he said, and his concern for himself was so much
less than his trouble for her that the heart of Kildare gave a
great stroke of pain. Mrs. Casey had created a masterpiece that was
now about to be stolen from her and from the world.
"He can't help me! He can't help me!" she said over and over two or
three times, looking into the future and finding it a black
emptiness.
The boy put an arm around her and turned apologetically toward
Kildare.
"Shall we go now, sir?" he asked.
"Yes," said Kildare crisply.
Mary Lamont opened the exit door. She tried to make herself
professionally matter-of-fact, but her voice was wobbly as she
murmured: "This way, please." A girl as young as that was no good
for this work, he decided. He liked having her around. She
freshened the day, and she had a bedrock, honest faith in him that
gave Kildare strength, but he would have to ask Gillespie for an
older nurse.
"Thank you, Doctor Kildare," the boy was saying as he went
out.
"Wait a minute," commanded Kildare.
They turned back suddenly. It was still the woman who seemed to
stand under the death sentence, not the boy. Mary Lamont watched
her doctor with a foolish brightness of expectancy. He scowled at
the three of them.
"The other doctors—you mean that they're right?" Mrs. Casey was
asking.
"No. I think they're not right," said Kildare. He watched the hope
spring up in their faces. "But I don't know where they're wrong."
They were struck blank again. "Will you ask Doctor Gillespie if
he'll make a special exception and see this patient?" he added to
the nurse.
She blessed him with her eyes and her smile as she hurried across
the room, but when she came to the door of the great internist's
inner office, she hesitated a moment to gather her courage before
she went in. Kildare could hear the pleasant murmur of her voice,
not the words; then came the roar of Gillespie, hoarse as the
barking of a sea-lion.
"I've told him before and I tell him again: I'll
see nobody! There's one last thing I can give
medicine, and I've got it now in the tips of my fingers. It's
almost in my hand if I'm let alone to work at it. What do I care
about one patient, when I'm thinking of the lives of ten thousand?
Get out!"
"Mother, let's go now. You heard him," said the boy.
"Hush yourself, Michael," said Mrs. Casey. "We'll go when we're
sent. Wait for the word!"
Her fierce eyes dwelt upon Kildare as Mary Lamont came back into
the room with her head bent so that they might not see the tears in
her eyes.
"Doctor Gillespie finds himself too occupied," she reported.
Kildare sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and crossed the room in his
turn. "I'll speak to him..." he said.
The inner office was stacked with cages of white mice that looked
like filing cabinets, each with a white label and a glittering
little water-tube. The odour of small animal life in the cages
tainted the air as a drop of slime taints drinking water. The
diagnostician, who had turned his private sanctum into a menagerie,
had two of the cages on the arms of his wheel chair. In triumph he
laughed aloud to Kildare: "We're getting it, Jimmy! It's almost
here! Look at this, will you?"
Six little white mice lay dead in one cage; in the other five were
full of scamper and haste and only one was lifeless.
"Change the dosage a little and I think we've got it," said
Gillespie. "There's the six of the control as dead as pins; and
here's five out of six that the injection saved. Five out of six!
What d'you think of it?"
"I want to talk to you..." began Kildare.
"I don't want chatter from you. I want work!" declared Gillespie.
"If you'll talk mice and meningitis, all right. Otherwise I have no
time. We're going to whip meningitis into a corner, young Doctor
Kildare. We're going to make it afraid to show its face. D'you hear
me? We might even wangle a mangy little bit of a half-baked
reputation for you out of this experiment. What
are you hanging your head about now?"
His savage impatience made him jerk back his head. Brittle old
muscles which failed to cushion the shock allowed a violent tremor
to run down through his body. Kildare winced at the sight of
it.
"I want you to see a patient. I want five minutes of your time,"
said Kildare.
Old Gillespie banged the top of a mouse cage with the flat of his
hand, and the mice began to weave a white pattern on the floor of
the cage as they raced around it in terror.
"You don't want my time; you want my brain!" he shouted. "And you
can't have it!"
"He's a twelve-year-old boy," said Kildare steadily.
"I don't give a damn if he's the prince of Siam or the emperor of
Cochin-China!" cried Gillespie. "I won't see him."
"His mother's a washwoman," said Kildare.
"Let her keep to her tubs and her suds then."
"And she's making the boy a gentleman."
"We don't want gentlemen; we want hard men who can take a chisel
edge."
"They call it pernicious anaemia—the other doctors—and they're
wrong."
"I don't give a damn about anaemia and other doctors and their
errors; a lot of ignorant fools. I'm going on with this experiment
and nothing else. You hear me?..."
"They call it anaemia, and they're wrong," repeated Kildare.
"What do you think it is?"
"I don't know. Here's the case history and the laboratory
reports."
"I'm not interested," said Gillespie, snatching the papers. "I'll
have nothing to do with it...Why don't you think it's
anaemia?"
"The blood picture showed no macrocytes," said Kildare.
"Then why the devil are you wasting my time?" demanded Gillespie.
"Why don't you get him in here where I can lay eyes and hands on
him?"
Kildare hurried back to the other room. With a handkerchief he
rubbed the wet from his forehead as he beckoned to the boy. "Doctor
Gillespie will see you," he said. This new
accession of hope was too much for Mrs. Casey. She sank into a
chair and stared at the floor. Mary Lamont hurried toward her as
Kildare ushered the boy into the presence of Gillespie, who was
glowering at the laboratory reports.
Without lifting his head he snapped: "Palpable spleen, Doctor
Kildare?"
"Yes, sir," said Kildare.
"Make a fragility test?"
"No, sir."
"Why not?"
"The fragility test isn't one of the regular routine."
"That's one of the damnations of the world—routine, routine,
routine. People want to live by instinct, not by brains. Is the
human race going to become a lot of damned insects? Use the mind
more and routine less. Have a fragility test made at once."
"Yes, sir," said Kildare.
"Young man," continued the internist, lifting his head and
gathering the shag of his brows together, "do you ever have pains
here—up on your left side?"
"Yes, sir," said the boy.
"You didn't tell me that," said Kildare.
"I only have them now and then," declared young Casey.
"When you have those pains, your skin is turning yellow, eh?" asked
Gillespie.
"Yes, sir," agreed the boy.
"It's the dilating spleen," stated Gillespie. "I think this boy has
haemolytic icterus, Jimmy. Have them get the spleen out of him and
he'll be as fit as a fiddle again." He pointed a sudden finger at
the Casey boy. "You hear me? You're going to be as right as a
trivet inside two weeks. Get out of my sight and tell your mother
the news...Stay here, Jimmy!"
"Thank you, sir...thank you, Doctor Kildare," the boy was saying as
he left the room. He hurried his thanks in his eagerness to bring
the great news to his mother; Kildare closed the door slowly after
him.
"Are you going to break your fool heart because you missed one case
in two hundred?" asked Gillespie, already at work on some Petri
dishes that contained a reddish agar.
"No, sir," said Kildare.
"You are, though. Or why do you stand there with that dumb look on
your face like a wet hen?"
Kildare looked from the white hair of Gillespie, as wild as a
windstorm, to the purple-blue beneath his wrinkled eyes. "I'll
never learn half what you know," he said. "I'll get used to seeing
that. But what I see right now is that you're burning yourself up
with this experiment."
"That's a lie and a loud one," answered Gillespie, dragging a loop
of wire over the agar and commencing to transfer the colony of
bacteria to three other dishes. "I never felt better in my
life."
"Why does your hand shake then?" asked Kildare.
"None of your damned business. Leave me alone...till I need you,
Jimmy. Will you?"
"Yes, sir," answered Kildare, and went unwillingly from the
room.