 | CHAPTER VI Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
6. CHAPTER VI
The oil in his lamp was almost gone, Walter noticed. Turning
the flame low, he pushed back his book and got up from the desk.
His legs were stiff from long sitting, and he had a crick in his
neck. Stretching, he went to the window. The silence lay softly
over the dark city as he looked out at the starry night.
Since he had been attending classes and studying eight-
een or twenty hours a day, the nighttime had become almost as
familiar to him as the daylight in which he had been moving for
seventeen years. He liked the feeling of having the world to all
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elbow room to think and study; the dark and the silence quenched
all distractions. At this hour, too late for the most determined
merrymakers, only the ill and the unhappy -and the very diligent-
were still up. Even Chris, who had sat up studying with him until
well past midnight, had gone to bed.
The door opened softly, and Walter turned to see Pa,
dressed, like most of the male population of the country at this
hour, in the classic white nightshirt.
“My dear boy!” he exclaimed. “Aren't you ever going to
bed? It's after three.”
“Come in, Pa. I'm going soon. We're having a chem-
istry quizz tomorrow, and I wanted to brush up a bit.”
“Another? You had one a couple of weeks ago.”
“I know. We have them all the time. In everything.
It keeps you on your toes, and keeps your knowledge in circulation.
You don't have a chance to forget what you've learned.”
“It's a good system,” his father agreed. “But I'm wor-
ried about you, Walter. I don't think you've had more than four
or five hours sleep a night for weeks.”
“I'm trying to do two years' work in one, Pa,” Walter
reminded him. “I'm not brilliant, so I can't learn without work-
ing, but I can work hard, and I must. It isn't doing me any harm.
I have no fear of the consequences.”
“Well, I have,” Pa said with emphasis. “You'll make your-
self sick by not getting enough rest.”
“I don't think so. I feel fine. In any case, I have no
choice. I got into medicine by accident, but I can't stay in it
that way. I'll have to work my hardest, especially if I'm to get
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isn't the easy thing it used to be, you know.”
“Walter, the best assets you'll ever have in your life
are your health and your wits. Keeping hours like this will ruin
one and addle the other. Now get on to bed, like a good fellow,”
Pa said authoritatively. “You can resume your education in the
morning,” he went on drily. Whatever else you may think, the night
was created for rest, and there are few better used to which you can
put it."
“All right, Pa,” Walter yild yielded with a smile. “I'll go
now. But please stop worrying about me.” Picking up the lamp, he
followed Pa into the hall. At the door of the room he and Chris
shared he whispered good night to his father. Then, blowing out
the lamp, he quietly opened the door and slipped noiselessly
into the dark room, so as not to disturb his sleeping brother.
* * *
Walter was right when he said that a medical education
was not the easy thing to acquire that it had been; certainly it
was not if you went to the University of Virginia for it.
During most of the previouseighteenth century there had been no
medical schools at all in America. Very few men went abroad to
study. A young man who wanted to be a doctor apprenticed himself
to a physician for a period of from three to eight years, accompan-
ied him on his calls and helped him compound his medicines. Then,
having learned as much as his native ability permitted through ob-
servation, trial and error, he went into practice for himself.
In the decade before the Revolutionary War two medical
schools had been founded: the Medical College of Philadelphia, which
later became a part of the University of Pennsylvania, and the med-
64. 65.
versity's College of Physicians and Surgeons. Before the end of
the century, both Harvard and Dartmouth had established medical
schools. Then a mushroom growth of medical schoolsthem set in. A
large proportion of them, staffed by incompetents and quacks and
run for private profit only, graduated “doctors” after only a few
months of perfunctory training. In spite of the work of the few
good schools, by the middle of the nineteenth century the reputation
of American medical education was so scandalous, and its results
were so dire, that a group of reputable and well trained physicians
formed the American Medical Association, with the primary purpose
of forcing certain minimum uniform requirements on both schools and
students. Their progress was slow and often discouraging, but the
association did, eventuallygradually, cause a great improvement in medical
education.
The medical training offered by the University of Virginia,
however, had never caused the educational reformers a moment's dis-
tress. Its term of study was considerably longer, and its require-
ments for the degree were more exacting by far than those of the
general run of medical colleges. It ranked with the best schools
of the time. Although it had no hospital attached to it then, and
hence few facilities for clinical instruction, its theoretical
teaching was unexcelled, as its founder, himself a more skilled
and learned practitioner than most doctors of his day, had intended
it should be. In Walter's time, those who intended to go into
practice usually went to Philadelphia or New York after their grad-
uation, where they got their clinical experience and took another
medical degree at a college connected with a hospital.
The current state of medical knowledge was reflected in
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four courses: chemistry and pharmacy under Dr. Maupin; medicine,
which included legal medicine and obstetrics, with Dr. Harrison;
physiology and surgery with Dr. Cabell; and anatomy and materia
medica with Dr. Davis. That session, for the first time, Dr. John
William Mallet was offering his optional course in clinical micro-
scopy, but there is no record to show that Walter took it.
Acceptance in America of the discoveries of Pasteur, which
were to revolutionize both the theory and practice of the science
of healing, was still several years in the future. No one in this
country conceived of the role of bacteria in disease and infection.
Preventive medicine and sanitation were practically unexplored
fields, although it was realized that there was some connection be-
tween cleanliness and good health. Epidemic fevers were still at-
tributed variously to filth, the night air, “miasmas” and the wrath
of God. The few medical men who ventured to suggest that insects
might have something to do with the spread of several of them were
decried by the profession as crackpots.
Although the discovery some twenty years earlier of an-
aesthetic agents, the greatest single medical advance of the century
up to that time, had given surgery a great impetus, Lister's re-
cently demonstrated antiseptic technique had as yet gained no fol-
lowers in this country. Wounds either healed “by first intention”
-that is, immediately and without complication -or something mys-
teriously went wrong and infection set in. When Walter was study-
ing, even the most scrupulous surgeon would have dismissed as ri-
diculous the notion that he might be carrying with him, from one of
his patients to another, infection and even death on his bright in-
struments and his bare hands.
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The sum total of medical knowledge, however, had increased vastly
over the preceding century. Much more was known of the functions
of the body and its organs, and of the cellular structure
of bone and tissue. Diseases were more accurately classified and
identified, and symptoms were differentiated from diseases them-
selves. Typhus and typhoid were no longer confused; measles, scar-
letina, smallpox and chickenpox were clearly distinguished. The
“bilious remittent fevers” were now separated into yellow fever,
dengue, typhoid and malaria. Kidney diseases had been recognized
and described, heart and lung and other diseases of organs identi-
fied. Medical knowledge was constantly on the march, a march no
less significant for being overshadowed by the tremendous burst of
progress shortly to follow.
The tools physicians worked with had improved, too. The
stethescope had been in use for about fifty years, enabling doc-
tors better to diagnose valvular diseases of the heart. The clin-
icanl thermometer, an unwieldly instrument almost a foot long, was
just coming into general use, and could reveal to a physician in
five minutes whether his patient had a fever or not. The hypoder-
mic syringe was beginning to be used, as were various instruments
useful in examination and diagnosis. The greatly improved micro-
scope made possible the study of cellular structure.
At the University of Virginia most of the medical lec-
tures were given in the upstairs room of the small square brick
building to the west of the other University buildings. Five
years before, Henry Scharf had completed his beautifully executed
series of colored plates, considered at the time the finest anat-
omical pictures in the country, for the use of the physiology and
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and, later, on, on laboratory animals, was to make them outmoded in
time, they were in constant use in Walter's day, when it was still
difficult to obtain corpses for medical students to dissect.
The University's medical course had provided for dissec-
tion from its beginning, but it was not until 1884 that the state
recognized the need for legal provisions governing the supply of
anatomical material. Until then, all medical schools in Virginia
had to obtain bodies by such devices as grave-robbing and bribing
dishonest undertakers to bury coffins heavy not with the remains
of the dear departed, but with weights. Executed criminals and
paupers buried in the potters' field were fair game for the resur-
rectionists, as the grave-robbers were called.
The operations of the resurrectionists provoked a cer-
tain ghoulish humor, as the following jingle, popular among medical
students of the time, suggests:
And made a snatch at me.
It's very hard them kind of men
Won't let a body be!
And think that there I be.
They haven't left an atom there
Of my anatomy!
At the University of Virginia the problem of getting
cadavers was left to one of the janitors -not to Old Henry, who
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but to another less venerable. Only a real love of science got
most of the students through the anatomy course. The cadavers,
few in number and ill preserved, gave many of the boys a life-
long distaste for dead bodies -not a bad thing, after all,
in a doctor.
Sometimes, looking back on his days as a medical student,
Walter wondered how he could have handled so much work. Day after
day, he spent hours in the dissecting room, sometimes with a wet
handkerchief tied over his mouth and nose to make the smell more
supportable, working on the corpse of some pauper or criminal who
was rendering this final, involuntary service to society; hours
working in the chemistry laboratory; hours examining and copying
Scharf's anatomical plates, until he had fixed in his mind forever
the position of every muscle and organ, the course of every vein
and artery; more hours at home, and these regularly carried him
into early morning, studying his text books and preparing
for the frequent quizzes. When he had time, he thought, too,
about the future.
He would work far into the morning for several weeks at
a stretch; then, yielding to Pa's forceful protests and his step-
mother's pleas, he would slack off a little. But it made him an-
xious to feel that he was working less hard than he might. He
had too much to do to waste time resting, he thought, and soon he
would be find himself, almost involuntarily, back on his old sched-
ule. He was young and healthy and strong, so the grind, as he in-
sisted, did him no harm. Above all, he was single-minded; and
that, more than anything else, enabled him to drive steadily ahead,
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noring fatigue when he could no longer deny it.
Chris and he had definitely decided to go to New York,
Chris to practice law and Walter to work at Bellevue Hospital
Medical College.
“If you're going to be a lawyer,” Chris theorized one
night when they were studying together after the rest of the house-
hold had gone to bed, “you might just as well be one in a place
where you won't ever run out of clients. Even if there are a lot
of lawyers in New York, I reckon there still are enough disputes
to go round among them.”
“It's as good a place as there is in the country for a
young doctor to train, too,” Walter observed, “and it certainly has
some of the finest hospitals. I'm glad you're going, too. Won't
we have fun exploring the city together!”
“Just think! A million people all at once! Remember
how Joey Rogers wouldn't believe us when we told him? It's almost
impossible to imagine, isn't it?”
“Charlottesville, times two hundred,” Walter suggested.
“Just suppose that, for every person you see here, you were seeing
two hundred. Does that help?”
““ Help!” Chris groaned. “How does it make you feel to
imagine four hundred people working at this desk right now? It
makes me feel so terrible,” he closed his book with a grin, “that
I'm going to bed. You'd better come, too.”
“Pretty soon,” Walter promised him. “Mind you don't
wake Pa, the way you did last night. It wasn't twelve yet, and
he made me go to bed.”
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“Pretty soon” was two hours later, but when he finally fol-
lowed Chris to bed, Walter felt that he could face Dr. Cabell's
test the next day with confidence.
* * *
Belching threateningly, the steam engine gathered its en-
ergies for the start. Its bell tolled loudly. Smoke, shot through
with sparks, puffed faster from its flaring stack. The high, heavy
wheels, which the engineer had tapped while the train waited, began
to turn. Slowly the old one story brick station moved backward,
taking with it the platform along which stood a line of ancient
hacks and Negro drivers equally aged. Mrs. Reed waved her damp
handkerchief again as she red receded. Pa, remaining stationary
amid the sliding scene by walking as fast as his long legs could
take him, shouted some final word lost in the clamor, and dropped
back waving his hat.
The train went faster. The scenery began to flow. Chris,
who had been staring out the window for a last look at famil-
iar things, sat back in his seat and regarded his brother.
“Well, Dr. Reed,” he said almost with awe, “we're on our
own now.”
As the train pounded over the long bridge across the Ri-
vanna River, both young men gazed out the window for a final sight
of Monticello, which, its decay softened by distance, watched the
valley from the crown of its flat topped hill.
“Dr. Reed!” Walter repeated. “I can still hardly believe
it.”
Commencement, preceded by the festivities of the various
fraternities and clubs, the parade through the arcades with Chin-
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sermons and the speeches, was past. On the first of July, 1869,
Dr. Maupin, true to his workd, had given Walter his medical degree.
He was, the chairman told him, the youngest man ever to earn one
from the University of Virginia. Walter was less impressed by the
luster of that distinction than by the responsibility it laid on him.
Through cuts, up and down inclines, the little engine
roared and strained along the road over the rugged, hilly
country to Gordonsville. It paused, blowing hard, at the tiny
town with the big whitewashed hotel, handful of stores and small white
houses, and let Chris and Walter, with the other Washington-bound
passengers, change to the Orange and Alexandria line.
“Walter, aren't you excited?” Chris demanded, after they
had disposed their baggage and lunch boxes about them for the sec-
ond time. “I feel as though I could hardly breathe.”
Walter turned shining eyes on his brother. “You know,”
he said, “I feel as if we were just about to step into the future.”
“Yes, we are about to step into the future,” Chris agreed
soberly. “And to step out of the past, too,” he added. “All
this....” he waved his hand, glancing out the window at the liquid
landscape streaming past. The train was passing out of the gradu-
ally subsiding hills, covered with pine and oak and infrequently
broken by scrubby farms in cleared patches, into the rolling farm-
lands beyond. An occasional levelled farmhouse among blackened
trees, a trench and breastworks on a bit of rising ground, a plow
abandoned in an uncultivated field, were all embraced in the past
that Chris's gesture implied.
“It's still very much the present for most souther-
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ravaged and bloodstained, and in the towns poverty stricken
by defeat, partisan feeling was as bitter as ever, and the war was
still the one absorbing topic among people burningly resentful
under the savage reprisals of the Reconstruction.
As the train rocked and jolted over the irregular and
neglected roadbed through the wide battle field of northern Vir-
ginia, the two young men saw everywhere reminders of the war. In
the country, neglected farms and buildings falling into disrepair
testified that the slaves, who had carried the South's whole ag-
rarian system on their broad shoulders, were now freemanfree men, most of
whom would bear no burden for a long time but their own tragic be-
wilderment. Skinny steers hitched to rickety carts indicated that
the ruined farmers still had neither the draft animals to plant
and reap crops, nor adequate crops to feed to or trade for draft
animals. In the towns, worn uniform jackets and trousers, the
newest and most substantial clothing their impoverished wearers co
could muster even now, were liberally sprinkled through the groups
waiting on station platforms to see the Washington train go by.
Neatly kept military cemeteries, with row after row of small white
markers watching over the last sleep of the Confederate
dead, were to be seen at almost every stop.
Not the least cogent reminder of the war's destruction
was the railroad itself, its roadbed even now in its war-time
condition. The light rails, repeatedly torn up and replaced, ac-
cording to the strategic necessities of retreating and advancing
armies, were loose and irregular. It was not unusual for a “snake's
head,” a rail with one loosened end reared into the air, to strike
the wheel of an oncoming car above its middle and drive through
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as chance dictated. Rickety bridges sometimes collapsed, or cars
screeching around a curve left the track and plowed up the sagging
roadbed, splintering ties and ripping the weak rails. Occasionally,
an exhausted engine would explode, or the train would be delayed
by running into cattle wandering in fatal innocence along the un-
guarded right-of-way and nibbling the grass that grew unhindered
between the rails. The railroads' disrepair all over the former
Confederacy was dangerous, but the economy of the South,
shattered by the war and saddled with the ironic burden of paying
for its own defeat, was unequal to rebuilding them.
At Culpeper, from which Grant had launched his costly
Wilderness campaign, Negroes balancing trays on their heads passed
up and down the platform under the car windows, selling
fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches, cakes and apples.
“Albemarle Pippins!” Walter exclaimed enthusiastically,
“Chris, we must have some! This will be our last chance to have
a home grown apple for a long time.”
Leaning out the window to attract the attention of the
vendor, the young doctor and the young lawyer could see the well-
groomed burial ground of the Union dead, a reminder of Grant's
operations in the vicinity.
Walter wiped his apple thoughtfully and took a bite be-
fore he spoke. “I wonder how it's going to be up there, Chris.
Is the war still as hot an issue as it is in the South?”
“I doubt it. Nobody can forget it here, where it still
shows so much -the cemeteries, and the cripples, and the uniforms,
and the poverty, and all the Reconstruction. Up there, they're
75.
“Of course, you and I have put it pretty well behind us,
but we're a little unusual. We were young when it ended, and
we've been too busy getting our professional training to think much
about it since. And Jim and Tom, who actually fought, are such
kindly fellows that they've let it go past, too. But most souther-
ners remember bitterly.”
“The losers always remember longer than the winners. Victors
are always glad to forget,” Chris pointed out.
“Well, the country's at peace again, and we're a new genera-
tion,” Walter said. “We didn't make the war, and we didn't fight
it -although we did want to be drummers, remember?” He smiled.
“It seems to me that the best thing we can do is try to
forget our grievances, and look to the future instead.”
Cinders were flying through the open window. Chris blew
some off his apple before taking another bite.
“Of course,” he assented. “It's the hard thing to do, but
it's the right one. And in a country the size of this one, there
is room for and work for everyone. You know, that reminds me -
I rather like your idea of going west some time. With the rail-
road clear across the continent now, it isn't a bad trip at all
any more.”
Walter laughted. “What a restless fellow you are, Chris!
We haven't even reached New York yet, and you're already talking
about going on.”
“You're the one who's restless,” Chris reminded him.
“You've been talking about going west ever since you were big
enough to read your geography.”
“Well, one thing at a time,” Walter decided. He tossed
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embankment. “We're on the brink of a new world. We both have
work to do in it, and there's no telling where it may take us.”
Falling silent, he gazed, his clear blue eyes fixed in
his characteristically intent expression, at the speeding land-
scape as it poured by, giving the illusion of pivoting on a point
somewhere beyond the horizon.
77.
| CHAPTER VI Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |