 | CHAPTER VII Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
7. CHAPTER VII
Dr. Reed, with cold politeness, finished questioning
his well dressed visitor, whose heavy gold watch chain, spanning
his comfortably curved front, loudly proclaimed the successful
professional man. The tall hat was tilted back on the
fringed dome, and the off-hand manner pointedly condescended to
the youthful Health Inspector.
“From yourl lucid description of the symptoms, sir,”
Reed summed up, carefully keeping sarcasm out of his voice, “I
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lymphadenoma.” And of a conscienceless quack, he added bitterly
to himself.
The older man assumed a judicious air. “Hmmmm, possibly,”
he conceded, stroking his full beard thoughtfully. “A rare case,
of course. Don't recall seeing one quite like it in my exper-
ience -wide experience,” he stressed the last phrase suggestively.
“The symptoms do suggest it, however.” He shrugged. “You might
as well enter the cause of death as lymphadoma.”
The miscalled medical name jarred on Reed only a little
less than the tone of dismissal, a tone that implied that there
were, still, a great many children in the world.
“Very bright of you to think of it, I'm sure,” the stout
doctor added patronizingly, drawing on his yellow kid gloves.
“Not at all,” Reed answered drily. He showed his visitor
to the door of the office, but did not offer to shake hands. Out-
side he caught sight of the doctor's carriage, with a pair of hand-
some bays, waiting in the street. andHe watched while the coachman
held the door and the doctor's portly person disappeared within.
Reed's mouth was set sternly as he seated himself at his
desk and jotted down a report on the case. The doctor who had
come to notify him, as one of the Brooklyn Health Inspectors, of
the death was a locally prominent practitioner. Yet he was so
grossly ignorant that he was unable to use medical terminology
correctly, or even to state symptoms accurately. Lymphadenoma was
not a rare disease, but he had failed to recognize a well marked
case. In the days whenbefore medical education was strictly regulated
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“The poor little girl!” Reed muttered aloud. He finished
writing and read over his report. “The poor little thing!” he
repeated resentfully.
Death was very familiar to the young doctor now. He had
encounteredmet it countless times -the corpses brought to the nar-
row white room of the Bellevue dead-house, the quiet, sheet-cov-
ered forms on the hospital beds, the pitiful figures dead of filth
and neglect and sometimes violence in the swarming tenement houses-
but he could never see it with indifference. Sensitive and imag-
inative, he always felt the pathos of each individual. It was never
a “case” that he treated; it was always a person.
Reed's zeal for his profession was keen; his enthusiasm
for the immense city, however, he realized, had changed in the four
years he had spent in it. During his first year, when his princi-
pal work had been to attend lectures at the Bellevue Hospital Med-
ican College and at Charity Hospital on Blackwell's Island and to g
go to clinics and autopsies, he had found time to be delighted with
New York's endless variety.
He had occasionally gone to the theatres -to the stock
company on fashionable Madison Square, or to the Italian opera at
the Academy of Music -and dropped in afterwards at the gay Fifth
Avenue Hotel, where sy stylish young men, gloved in the inevitable
yellow kid, eyed the pretty girls and twirled their glossy mus-
taches. On hot summer evenings he had listened to the concerts
in Central Park, and afterwards admired the brisk carriage horses,
handled by livried coachmen, as they whirled along the winding
drives.
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The big new buildings, too springing out of the earth everywhere,
had interested him, too. The Grand Central Station which, won-
derfully, had two acres of glass in its roof, was almost finished
then, and the splendid St. Patrick's Cathedral, begun a dozen
years before, was slowly toiling upward. He had been fascinated
by the waterfront, through which flowed some sixty percent
of the country's foreign trade, with its ocean-going steamers, and
tugs and ferries and sailing craft; and by the ambitions beginnings
of the new Brooklyn Bridge, to be the longest suspension bridge in
the world and the first to link Brooklyn to New York across the
swift current of the East River.
In Mott Street he had seen his first Chinese, some of
the bland and industrious hundreds who crowded in the rotting ten-
ements of Chinatown. On almost any street corner he could encount
encounter Italians, Germans, Irish or French, and hear them speak-
ing their own tongue. In his walks uptown he used sometimes to
come upon old farm houses, many of them relics of the colonial
past, tucked here and there about the city and hemmed in by factor-
ies and slaughter houses.
The contrasts and the bustle, the feeling of drive
and power in the big city, the sense of the new boisterously dis-
placing the old and of life expanding at breakneck speed into
vistas of boundless hope and wonder, had intoxicated the young
man from the country. Home had been nothing like this.
Gradually, however, his viewpoint had changed, ad-
justing and sobering. Interrupting his course at Bellevue at
the end of the 1870-1871 term to work in various of the city's
hospitals, he had come into close contact for the first time with
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had taken his medical degree in 1872, and from that time on his
services had been, for the most part, devoted to the very poor who
lived in the squatters' colonies in Central Park, out of sight of
the gay drives and the rich Avenue, and in the tenements that hud-
dled in side streets toward the rivers and downtown in the older
parts of the city. In tottering buildings, without sanitary fac-
ilities, ventilation or privacy, half a million people, half the
population of the richest and largest city in the country, lived
neglected in a squalor that Reed would have found unimaginable a
few years earlier, and which he could now believe only because he
actually saw it.
It was a period of unrestricted immigration. The poor
of all countries were swarming hopefully to the United States to
work in the coal mines and oil fields and factories, and to take
up claims on the free lands of the west. Steamship companies,
cutting their rates to attract trade, crowded the immigrants like
cattle into hold and steerage, where epidemics inevitably took
root among them. Pouring into New York, they spread their dis-
eases through the miserable tenements and the poverty-ridden
neighborhoods. Immigrants and native poor had an appalling rate
of sickness and death. Even those not actively sick with something
worse suffered from “the tenant-house rot,” grim blanket term for
rickets, scurvy, outright starvation and a dozen other ills.
When Reed had begun his hospital work in New York, the
situation had been slowly improving. Sanitary legislation had
been passed and the Metropolitan Board of Health established in
1866, after years of agitation by medical men and public minded cit-
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from the grasp of the Tweed Ring, a gang of criminal polititians
who were just then ruling and robbing New York City with brazen
greed, had sweeping powers not only over the city proper but over
Brooklyn and widely outlying districts.
The Board worked through Health Inspectors, most of them
young doctors recently out of medical school, who, among their
other duties, saw to it that cases of contagious diseases were
isolated or removed to the proper hospitals, and that tenement
house owners kept their property up the the requirements of the
Board of Health.
Reed, while interning at the King's County Hospital, had
attracted the notice of Dr. Joseph C. Hutchison, then a leading
doctor and surgeon in Brooklyn and a member of the Board of Health.
Dr. Hutchison had taken a liking to the pleasant, competent young
man, whose skill in surgery and in the treatment of children's
diseases was already marked. Perhaps, too, he remembered his own
struggles twenty years earlier when, like Reed, he had come from
the country to establish a practice in the toughest city in the
nation, a city which had received the fledgling doctor from Howard
County, Missouri, with the same indifference it was now displaying
toward the one from Charlottesville, Virginia. In any case, Dr.
Hutchison had expressed his liking by having Reed appointed a
Health Inspector.
The modest salary attached to this post was very welcome
to the young man just starting out in practice, and the experience
that the duties involved was just as welcome. New York's million
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and surgical cases which came to the hospitals where Reed, both
as student and practitioner, had the opportunity to see them.
Cholera, diphtheria, typhoid and erysipelas were among the dis-
eases which, we may assume from his later work, particularly in-
terested him at this time.
Perhaps, however, as early as 1871, the eruption of the
scandals about the Tweed Ring suggested to the boy from the coun-
try that there was something rotten about in the glamorous city
metropolis. Later, increasing familiarity with the submerged and
shameful side of the city, which noisily drew attention to its
rich men, its churches, schools, banks and the size of its charity
budget, had disenchanted him completely. Now this episode of the
arrogant, ignorant doctor, prospering on the miseries of the people
whom he did nothing to relieve, seemed the last straw.
He told Chris who, now launched on a successful legal
career, lived with him and shared many of his experiences.
Noticing his dejected air when he came in after his of-
fice hours, Chris asked, “What's the matter, Walter? Did you
have a hard day?”
“No, not particularly.” Walter walked to the window of
their room and stood looking out over the busy harbor and at the
low jumble of the Manhattan sky line beyond it. He noticed an
ocean lin steamer being warped to the pier, a steamer which, he
supposed from his experience, would debark not only its passen-
gers but a cargo of disease as well.
“Not particularly,” he repeated, “but I am so disgusted
that I should almost like to give up my profession!”
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“Walter!”
“No, no. Don't look so alarmed, Chris. Not really.
You know nothing would induce me to. But I do think I shall leave
New York. Do you know what happened to me today? I'll tell you.”
Speaking of the doctor's patronizing air, he could smile.
But he did not smile when he told of his ignorance and callousness.
Those, he declared, could work tragedy, and heaven knew how many
times they already had. “And yet that man, a first rate quack,
hads the leading practice in that part of Brooklyn. It makes one
ashamed of the profession.”
“But how can such a man become eminent, if he has no
qualifications?” Chris wanted to know.
“Oh, he hads ‘qualifications’ all right, but they're not
medical ones. He's independently wealthy, for one things, and
puts up a good front. He married a society woman, too. And he
has all sorts of political connections. It all adds up to a big
practice. It's very hard for a young man to have to compete with
pull and front.”
“It is discouraging,” Chris assented.
“And my age, too,” Walter went on, listing his diffi-
culties. “It's funny but true that a doctor's success for
the first decade depends more on his beard than his brains. I
entered my profession three or four years earlier than most men
do, and I look young. There's a tendency not to take a young man
as seriously, or have ans much confidence in him, as an older man.
On top of that, this work as Health Inspector is keeping me so busy
that I haven't time to build up a private practice. I'm thinking
more and more seriously of leaving New York, and going to some small-
er city, where the odds aren't so heavy and where I can get a faster
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Chris had been listening with a smile. Now he inquired,
“Haven't you rather -ah, glided -over another motive fore leav-
ing?”
At Walter's expression he broke into a luagh laugh. Walter
joined in.
“Well,” he answered a little sheepishly, “What better motive
could I have?”
“None,” Chris agreed unhesitatingly. “You've been almost
bubbling oever since you visited Pa in Murfreesboro in June,” he
teased. “And you should see your face when you find a letter waiting
for you. A blind man could tell what's the matter with you.”
“You may call it something the ‘matter’ with me,” Walter said
cheerfully, “but I like it. But I haven't asked her yet -I don't
see how I can until I have an assured income. That's another rea-
son I'm so anxious to get established in a hurry. I've been thinking
about entering the Army -that's a modest, steady salary, and I'd
like nothing better for a few years than moving about and seeing
the country. Torney's been talking it up to me, too.”
“George Torney? The fellow you were in the University with?
I thought he was a Navy doctor.”
“He's changing,” Walter grinned. “Dry land may not be as
exciting, but at least it doesn't roll. He suffers from invincible
seasickness. Every time he sets foot on a boat he's the sickest
man aboard.”
“Poor fellow,” Chris laughed. “It does seem rather a good
idea for you, Walter, and an answer to your problem. Who would
ever have thought, though, ten years ago, that one of us would want
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“No one, I guess. It would have been scandalously disloyal
even to dream of such a thing. However, I haven't decided yet. I
want to ask Pa's advice. Let's go out to dinner now. I have a
lot of calls to make this evening.”
* * *
In mid-July he confided his plan to the girl whom he had
met on his visit to his father. In his clear, even writing he
wrote to Emilie Lawrence,
“I have been recently contemplating a departure from Brook-
lyn.... I have about made up my mind to make a strenuous effort to
enter the Medical Corps of the United States Army.” He went on to
explain his reasons, the same ones he had mentioned to Chris, and
added that he would want to remain in the Army for just a few years.
“If at the end of that time (3 or 4 years hence) I could find some
fair damsel who was foolish enough to trust me,” he suggested hopefully, “I think I would
get -married, and settle down to sober work for the rest of my days
in some small city where one could enjoy the advantages of a city
and at the same time not feel as if lost.”
The onset of love had been sudden and hard. He had known
the girl to whom he was writing just a month. She, for her part,
was already taken with the decisive young man who had fallen so im-
petuously in love with her.
The Exmanamining Board of the Army Medical Corps, which exam-
ined applicants for the service, met in New York on August 4th,
1874. Reed, taking a few hours off from his duties, went over to
see its Recorder, and was dismayed to learn that candidates were
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matics and history. “Horror of Horrors!” he lamented to Miss Law-
rence when he wrote her a week later. “Imagine me conjugating an
irregular verb, or telling what x + y equals, or what year Rome was
founded, or the battle of Marathon fought. Why, the thing is im-
possible, I shall utterly fail. Add to this that each applicant is
examined five hours each day for six successive days -thirty hours'
questioning -and, to cap the climax, there are more than 500 appli-
cants for less than 30 vacancies? The very thought of it makes me
dizzy. Think of my condition and pity me, for I need all the sym-
pathy of all my friends.”
Dizzy or not, Reed must have had ghigher hopes of success
than he betrayed. Having a naturally cheerful disposition, he alw
always approached undertakings with an optimism that gave him a
good running start. He surrounded himself with text books and set
to work with the same industry that had carried him through the Uni-
versity medical school in a year.
Unfortunately, he worked so hard that he made himself sick
in a fortnight. It had been years since he had had any sort of ill-
ness, but now he was prostrated for three weeks.
“I remember the time when I could safely study as much as
20 hours uninterruptedly day after day, and not experience any bad
effect from it, but I presume that time shall return no more.” Thus
he mourned his lost youth to the young lady who would, he hoped,
share his rapidly advancing years.
The approach of the examination and the difficulty of re-
freshing his knowledge of so many forgotten things threw him
into a panic. He worked desperately, late into each night. When
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as he wrote his sympathetic confidante, “the thought flashes
through my mind that there are a thousand things in that cast-aside
volume of which I am ignorant, a thousand unanswerable questions
that may rise up against me in the day of my examination, to humble
and mortify me. Wracked with a thousand fears, I tear open the book
and eagerly scan its pages, determined to exhaust every effort, and,
if need be, to suffer death rather than defeat.”
The mental strain that fathered this somewhat extravagant
resolution subsided as the rest enforced by illness began to take
effect. The examination, too, was deferered, and Reed, deeply re-
lieved, determined to treat himself with more discretion now that
he had until the middle of January to prepare for it.
His good intentions to the contrary, he made himself ill
again by the beginning of November. “Alas!” he mourned to his an-
xious correspondent, “I am so harrassed.” Calling finally on the
discipline instilled in his youth and developed over the interven-
ing years, he made a strong efflort to face his problem reasonably.
With the unpretentious determination characteristic of him, he wrote
Emilie Lawrence, “Still I believe that when a person determines to
accomplish an end, that he should put forth all honest effort, nor
turn aside, unless for the best of reasons; and if he meets with
defeat let him accept it like a man, remembering that many better
men have found themselves in a like situation. At all events I
shall pr pursue my course until every prop is knocked away from un-
der me. Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.”
By January improved health and increased calmness had
cheered him to the point where he could write hopefully of the im-
pending examination. It was postponed again, this time for a month.
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Finally, one February day, Reed entered the shabby building
in downtown New York where the Examining Board met to face the week-
long inquisition. At its close, he jubilantly wrote Miss Lawrence
that he had passed with conspicuous success.
She was as elated as he. But his letter was not satisfactory,
she complained. He must come down and tell her in person. The
happy young man hurried south with the details of his good news.
Bemused with joy, he lost his bag in Norfolk and arrived in Murfrees-
boro, barely disconcerted, to greet his beloved in travel-stained
linen. Her brother equipped him with fresh clothes, and, restored
to his customary cleanliness, he preoceeded to deal with the matter
most pressingly on his mind. Miss Lawrence saw eye to eye with him
on it. Family blessings were obtained, and their engagement promptly
followed.
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| CHAPTER VII Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |