Annie sat in the rocking chair in her bedroom, nursing Abigail, while Laura and Caro sat at the round table and discussed the evening’s events. Nate and Mitchell had stayed downstairs in the dining room, arguing over some local political scandal. Nate tended to support the Republicans; Mitchell, as a good Irishman, was a Democrat.
She said, “That was certainly a very interesting evening. I am so glad you were able to come, Miss Sutton.”
“I appreciate having been invited. I confess, after hearing about the Truscotts, I am interested in learning more about the Pacific Dispensary, particularly their decision to have the entire permanent staff be female.”
“I am sure I could arrange for Dr. Blair to give you a tour,” Annie said.
“I’m glad you found the discussion interesting, Caro. However, what I really want to know is what do you think of Mitchell? I know you said that he showed up as the laboratory assistant in one of your clinical classes, but now that you’ve spent some time with him, what’s your overall impression?”
“A bit too full of himself for my taste,” Caro said. “Although, from my experience so far, this is almost a prerequisite attitude for young men in the medical profession.”
Annie said, “I don’t remember him being quite that way the couple of times he’s been to the boardinghouse. Maybe medical school has been a bad influence on him. I thought if he called me Mrs. Dawson one more time, I was going to hit him on the head. Made me feel ancient, even though I know for a fact that I am at least three years younger than him.”
Laura laughed. “In my case, I’ve always thought he treats me like some sort of child…although that could be my brother’s bad influence on him. This evening I realized I hadn’t seen him since Abigail was born, and I hadn’t seen him much before that. He sort of disappeared once we all started up at the university.”
She turned to Caro and said, “The summer before last, when Kitty Blaine and Seth would come here to study on the weekends for the university entrance exams, he would stop by…say he was checking on whether Seth was ready to go back to the boardinghouse with him. But we all knew he was here to see Kitty. The four of us did some things together. A trip to Woodward’s Gardens once. And remember, Annie, when we went into the mountains to get the Christmas tree that year? I think he asked her to dinner once. She turned him down.”
Caro said, “I do have difficulty imagining the two of them together. Dr. Mitchell doesn’t have enough polish for our Miss Blaine.”
Laura laughed. “I remember she was surprised that he thought her father would let her go to dinner with a man, unchaperoned. And that was that. He stopped coming by. Of course, now that I think about what did happen to her, I can’t help but think she would’ve been a lot safer with Mitchell. He might be rough around the edges, but I do believe he has a good heart. And it’s a shame, given how hard he worked to get his medical degree, he isn’t really able to start his career yet.”
Annie said, “I agree, and now I feel bad about being so irritated with him tonight. Nate once told me Mitchell came from a poor Irish family back east, worked his way to San Francisco so he could apprentice himself to an uncle with a pharmacy. Like your Seth, Laura, he had little formal schooling before he started medical school. No wonder he lacks polish. And I guess I didn’t think about the fact that it would take capital to start out as a doctor, either that or get brought into someone else’s practice.”
Laura said, “And he was so good to Nate during your confinement. Every time I would come down to give a report, there he’d be, telling Nate that everything was going according to plan, that he had nothing to worry about.”
Caro said dryly, “That confident manner, even when it might not be warranted, is what a patient wants from a doctor. My difficulty with it is that I’ve personally seen the damage that can be done when a patient blindly believes that a doctor knows exactly what needs to be done.”
Annie said, “Well, that brings us back to what he said about Dr. Skerry. Tilly came to the door at that point, and I missed a bit. Did I understand him to say there was some sort of feud between this Dr. Skerry and Dr. Granger and Dr. Brown?”
Laura said, “He said there was actually a newspaper article about it, so I thought I would try to track that down. Something about an attempt by Dr. Skerry to get accepted by the California Medical Society. He said she was turned down…and it was Dr. Granger and Dr. Brown who said she shouldn’t be accepted, evidently because she was a homeopathic doctor.”
Caro said, “Well, if that’s true, then she shouldn’t have tried to get accepted by that society. There is a different state society just for homeopathic practitioners in California. They would be the best organization to judge her training and experience. I suppose she might have wanted to be recognized by both. That would be odd.”
Laura said, “Annie, did you hear Mitchell say Dr. Skerry has her own newspaper? He says he reads it occasionally for a laugh it is so outrageous. But he remembers Skerry said some very cutting things about both Dr. Brown and Dr. Granger in one article. There was something about Skerry wanting to be a smallpox inspector and that Granger had blocked that as well. I thought I would track down this paper she puts out, see which printers produce it. Maybe I can find back copies and see what all the fuss was about.”
“Thank you, Laura. That would be a help. And I can certainly understand if this Dr. Skerry felt her professional bona fides were not being respected, she might have a reason to try and turn the Truscotts against the dispensary. But that doesn’t explain why Mitchell feels that she could be dangerous. I thought the whole argument for homeopaths was that the medicines they prescribe can’t harm you.”
“That’s generally true,” Caro said. “The theory, at least as posited by the German doctor that started it all, was ‘like cures like.’ Homeopaths believe if you take very diluted amounts of the organisms that cause an illness or cause the symptoms of an illness, this will somehow cure that illness. There is some disagreement over whether there is actually anything left of the original matter at the end of this dilution process. But the assumption is that, if there is, it would be in such a minuscule amount that it couldn’t do any harm.”
“So how is that supposed to cure the disease?” Laura said.
“That’s a good question, and of course there doesn’t seem to be any scientific basis for this theory.”
“But you mentioned that homeopathic doctors have their own medical society, their own schools, so doesn’t that make them real doctors?”
“That is also up for debate,” Caro said. “Most physicians who have been trained at institutions that reject the theory behind homeopathy think their practitioners shouldn’t be recognized as doctors. One problem, however, is that there are a lot of unknowns associated with regular medicine as well. In fact, a lot of people have turned to homeopathy or alternatives like the water cure because these methods are much less likely to harm a patient. As a result, it is hard for regular doctors to argue that they should be the only ones to practice medicine. In addition, this is a hard stance for statewide politicians to take when there are a lot of good citizens, who vote, who believe in homeopathy.”
Laura said, “Does this mean that just anyone can say they are a doctor and get listed in Langley’s directory?”
Annie laughed, startling Abigail, who stopped nursing for a moment and frowned. She patted her daughter on the back and said, “You can pretty much call yourself anything you want…when advertising in the newspapers or in the city directory. I learned that when I started looking into what I could do to advertise myself as Madam Sibyl. A good number of so-called clairvoyants announce in their ads that they give medical advice, and I had clients who wanted me to do that for them. So I wouldn’t be surprised if even some clairvoyants have gotten themselves listed in the directory as physicians.”
Annie looked over at Caro and saw by the lack of surprise on the young woman’s face that Laura had told Caro about her years as Madam Sibyl.
Caro took off her spectacles, polished them with a handkerchief, and put the glasses back on. Then she said, “It seems to me that the issue isn’t whether Dr. Skerry is doing something illegal. California says that if someone like Dr. Skerry got a medical degree from an institution that the California Homeopathic Medical Society accepts as legitimate, she is a doctor and can practice medicine in the state.”
Annie said, “Then what is the problem?”
“The difficulty is that while homeopathic medicine by itself shouldn’t harm a patient, neither is there scientific evidence that it will do anything to cure them. This wouldn’t be a problem, for example, if a homeopathic doctor treated a patient who had a bad cold or had eaten something that disagreed with them. But if the patient has a serious illness that could be cured using modern scientific methods, then…”
Annie looked up in alarm. “Then Mitchell was right. If Phoebe Truscott does have a serious infection, and she is only being given homeopathic medicine, she could die of that infection. It’s not because of what Dr. Skerry might do, but what she might not do that could prove fatal!”
Nate came up behind his wife, who was standing ready for bed and unpinning her hair and putting the pins into a small porcelain bowl on the chest of drawers. When she had pulled out the last pin and her hair began to cascade down her back, he picked up a brush and began to pull it gently through her curls, using his fingers to break up any tangles. Annie smiled at him in the mirror above the chest of drawers and pushed lightly against the brush, rather like a cat would when being petted.
He had planned on discussing what they had learned from Mitchell and Miss Sutton. Who could have predicted that the medical profession was so rife with divisions? Although why he should be surprised, he wasn’t sure. He guessed he had thought that educated men and women who had dedicated their lives to help others would be above squabbles over where a hospital would be located or who would get appointed as a city health inspector.
Yet, just last spring, having seen what his sister had experienced at the Berkeley campus of the university, he already had a stark glimpse of how far even the leaders of an academic institution could go when they were more worried about their prestige and salaries than the welfare of their students.
At least, after dinner tonight, he had a much better understanding of the operation that Truscott’s wife had undergone and why the dispensary doctors felt it was necessary. And as far as he could tell from what Mitchell said, everything had been done to ensure Mrs. Truscott’s safety and successful recovery.
On the other hand, he also had a better appreciation of why the man would be so upset if his wife was feeling ill again. The description of what had been happening to the poor woman, for over nearly two years, had been simply horrific. Nate thought of how helpless he’d felt during the last months of his wife’s pregnancy and the sheer terror he experienced during the long hours of her confinement. How must Richard Truscott have felt, watching as his wife’s stomach got more and more distended in a parody of pregnancy, with all the accompanying discomfort, embarrassment, and unremitting pain? And to be able to do nothing!
Yes, he now felt ready to send a letter off Monday morning asking Mr. Truscott to meet with him as soon as possible to discuss the concerns he had expressed in his letter to Mrs. Branting.
Meanwhile, he was sure that Annie had some opinions about how he should approach the man, and he had learned to pay attention to his wife’s ideas. She was one of the most insightful people he’d ever met, particularly when it came to discerning other people’s motivations. With his daughter asleep next door under the watchful care of Kathleen, it would be nice to have a cozy chat before they retired without having to whisper the whole time.
He put the brush down and was just going to ask Annie what she’d thought of what they’d learned this evening when she turned and kissed him fully on his mouth, her body, clothed only in a thin nightgown, pressed up against his.
He realized he had a much better idea about what to do with his wife before they went to sleep, and it didn’t involve talking.