Testimony Of Two Men (63 page)

Jonathan struck his chest dramatically. “My heart lies elsewhere,” he said. “If it did not, I’d be galloping around the young lady like a centaur, though I assure you she is not a mare.”

Dr. Harrington eyed him curiously. “What gives you the idea that such a paragon would look at a poor doctor who is still paying off his debts for his education?”

“I told you. She is a girl of high principles. Moreover, the thought of money has never entered that lovely head. I know these unworldly girls, though she thinks she is very ‘modern.’ Her father is an eminent scholar and has more money than he knows or she knows. Go to her in the guise of Sir Galahad and you can sweep her up on your white steed whenever you say the word. She ‘loves to serve,’ and while I usually find that phrase a curse word, in Elvira’s case it sounds very pretty, coming as it does from such pretty and unkissed lips.”

“What’s wrong with her that she’s never been kissed?” Dr. Harrington was suspicious.

“Devotion to parents, dedication to ‘duty,’ and horrible, isn’t it? However, her mother died not long ago, and as Papa is only forty-nine or so, he will inevitably remarry, and where will that leave Elvira? Not only permanently unkissed but un—”

“Hey,” said Dr. Harrington, as a pair of young nurses began to pass them. “Watch your language.” But he grinned.

“Somebody’s got to rescue Elvira,” Jonathan went on, “and if it isn’t you, it is going to be some scoundrel, for she hasn’t a single idea of what men are, and isn’t she lucky? I prefer to see her in competent and conscientious hands, which will guide her gently to the marriage bed and instruct her in all the things every good woman should know.”

“I know one end of women very well,” said Dr. Harrington. “I’m not up on the other end; just an amateur.”

“You have enough knowledge for Elvira,” said Jonathan. “She’ll think you are a veritable rake—and adore it. She’s the kind of a woman who can become very fiery, and aren’t they loves? Well?”

“How do I meet her?”

“Very simple. Her father was suffering from hysterical paralysis and aphasia. I cured him with brandy in about half an hour.” Dr. Harrington raised his eyebrows at this. “It’s a fact,” said Jonathan. “His wife was devoted to him and he to her, and you may have noticed that when a man has lost a good wife, he rushes out soon to find one exactly like her, and usually succeeds. My erudite conversation, and my brandy, got him out of bed almost immediately, and I’ll be sadly mistaken if he isn’t married again in six months, or if he is not thinking of that very thing at this very minute. A dependent sort of cuss, who can’t live without a loving woman. If he marries before Elvia is engaged, or interested, or something, she’ll feel abandoned and will remain an old maid.

“So, all you have to do to meet Elvira is to drop in on her father in my name, my kindly name, to see how he is getting along.”

“I’m a gynecologist, and though
I
could perform some spirited schottisches with Elvira, I’m afraid I couldn’t do that with Papa,” said Dr. Harrington, who was now very interested. “But, how do I explain that your replacement didn’t come? How do I explain my coming at all?”

“You have no imagination,” said Jonathan, shaking his head. “You aren’t going there as a physician; you are doing this out of your Christian heart, as my friend and my emissary. My replacement is too busy for casual calls. And, by the way, you mustn’t explain, on the first visits, what you really do, or Elvira will want to know details and will be looking up the word in a medical dictionary—and I’m sure she has one. There is nothing which will turn a woman away from a man so fast as when she discovers he knows all about women. Amorously is fine; women love rakes. But clinically, no. She’ll suspect that such a man will lack ardor and that in the very midst of licit lovemaking she will wonder if he is thinking of her parts in an objective fashion, and that’s death to romance. Get in a few first kissings and a few soft tumblings, and then you can admit your criminal specialty and assure her that you are first a man then a physician. Convince her that you can rut at least as well as the driver of
a
beer wagon and that you can’t wait to demonstrate. It won’t be hard. These intellectual women can truly inflame and grattify a man, and I don’t mean intellectually, either.”

“You put it eloquently,” said Dr. Harrington. “You entice me.”

“Let Elvira entice you,” said Jonathan. “By the way, she told me she doesn’t trust doctors, and she may try to make you a convert to homeopathy or health foods and ‘nature’s way.’ Don’t groan, please. Teach Elvira that there’s one ‘nature’s way’ in which you are an expert, and she’ll want you to demonstrate, but after the wedding bells, of course. But you are certainly imaginative enough to incite her own imagination, aren’t you, with a few deft words and teasing touches, and raise up those naughty anticipations even the nicest girl feels?”

“Don’t get thee behind me, Satan,” said Philip Harrington. “What’s her address?”

Having accomplished this worthy deed of righting a young lady’s affliction, Jonathan proceeded down the corridor. Near the doctors’ lounge room he encountered Dr. Louis Hedler. “Well, Louis,” he said, “I’ve been in to see young Hortense Nolan and she’s coming along splendidly and in about a year she can start a new baby. But, for God’s sake, get young Harrington for her or someone like him. What’s the matter?” he added.

Dr. Hedler was looking very solemn and high-minded. “Come into the lounge, Jon,” he said. “No one is there just now. This is private.” He importantly seated himself and regarded Jonathan portentously. Jonathan knew that expression. Louis had something to impart to him which was personally unpleasant but which could give Louis pleasure. Too bad, thought Jonathan, that a grateful man can’t remain grateful. He sat down and neatly arranged the legs of his trousers, and crossed his knees. “All right, Louis. What did I do now which has raised the dust on Olympus?”

“You have done nothing ‘wrong,’ nothing at all, Jon. You will recall that you made a very loud uproar not long ago about surgeons performing operations when it was more than suspected that they were taking drugs?”

“I do. No man under the influence of heroin or morphine or any other derivative of opium should touch a scalpel under any circumstances, nor should such a man ever practice the most innocuous medicine, nor should his diagnosis ever be accepted. We’re not running a slaughterhouse here, and God knows enough surgeons like that have slaughtered, and in recent history, too.”

“Well, now, Jon. I always did think you were too harsh. You have new-fashioned ideas about the dangers of addiction on the part of doctors. I still don’t quite agree. Nothing, so far, has been definitely proved that those drugs are harmful or can impair a man’s efficiency. A doctor is under stress most of the time. If he takes something to relax him, there is some evidence that this is not only supportive but beneficial. I’m sure that some doctors are what you call ‘addicted,’ and it has been my opinion that they did no harm and that the unfortunate events in the operating rooms here in St. Hilda’s, and in the Friends’, would have occurred anyway even in the hands of a nonaddicted surgeon. But I gave this opinion before, before the Board.”

“I disagree,” said Jonathan, flushing with anger. “I investigated the last two ‘unfortunate events’ myself. They were uncomplicated and simple operations. The victims—yes, they were victims of men made incompetent by drugs—died needlessly. I am working with a large committee of doctors now, from all over the United States, to have the Federal Government proscribe the indiscriminate giving of narcotics by practicing physicians to patients, and to bar addicted doctors from surgery or the practice of medicine until they are cured.”

Louis smiled indulgently. “I doubt that even politicans would be stupid enough to pass such a law,” he said. “In my opinion those drugs are no more harmful, or dangerous, than aspirin or bicarbonate of soda. I never tried them myself, but neither am I addicted to alcohol.” He looked meaningly at Jonathan, who laughed shortly.

“So, it is rumored around, as well as other rumors, that I am a drunkard, too? Where did that come from? Dear Mavis?”

Louis was shocked. “Jonathan! How can you speak so contemptuously of that lovely girl who was your unfortunate wife?”

“Come on, now, Louis. Mavis spread that rumor. There was some grounds for it, I admit. But I never enter an operating room if I have had a drink within the past six hours, and I never drink the night before an operation, except for a little beer or a glass of wine. I drink very little at social gatherings, and everyone knows that. So only Mavis could have told it around that I can punish a bottle as well as the next man, if I have no following responsibilities. And you surely aren’t insinuating that alcohol—to a man who isn’t alcoholic—is no more dangerous than narcotics?”

“I consider them all narcotics.” Louis was righteously pompous.

“I consider gourmandizing addiction, too,” said Jonathan. “Anything to excess is dangerous. But drugs are in a special class by themselves. They aren’t self-limiting. A man who is
a
gorger at the table does arrive at the place where he can’t eat any more, and an alcoholic does drop off into a stupor, where he can do no harm. But drugs aren’t like that. More demands more, and the appetite increases, and eventually the man dies or goes mad. I’m no humbug, Louis, no self-appointed busybody about my fellowman. I believe in minding my own business. Let a man kill himself with food or women or drink or drugs. That’s his own affair. But when he becomes a menace to the innocent who trust him in an operating room, or in his offices, then he has no business there, and it is our business to put him out of business.” He paused. “A man who is drunk is soon detected by patients, and his practice vanishes. But what layman can tell when his doctor is dangerously ill of drugs and incompetent?”

Louis frowned. Jonathan went on, with increasing anger: “An addicted doctor fools himself that his addiction is just a pleasant way of releasing his strains, and is harmless, and so he prescribes them freely for any patient with a headache or
a
backache or a toe ache or an ache in his soul or his ass. And the patient is free to have that prescription filled and refilled indefinitely, and also free to give the stuff to others. Haven’t you read the latest warnings, Louis? Four out of every ten doctors are now addicted, and so a disaster to their patients. Three out of every fifteen American laymen are also addicted. These are facts, Louis, facts compiled by responsible doctors and sent to the proper Senators and Congressmen in Washington, and it won’t be long before there is a Narcotic Drugs Act, and you can bank on it!”

Louis still said nothing. Jonathan stood up, pushed his hands into his pockets, and began to pace the room. After a few moments he stopped in front of the older doctor. “Louis, we’ve had patients here, scores of them, unfortunate men and women addicted to drugs prescribed by their physicians. You’ve seen some of them, many of them, when we’ve taken them off the lethal things. Some of them die in convulsions. All of them suffer tortures. We have to institute a slow withdrawal program, and it isn’t permanently successful. The poor devils leave here ‘cured,’ and within a few days there they are again in the drugstores, with a new prescription, given to them either by a doctor who refuses to face the truth or an addicted one. Haven’t you been reading the new articles in our very own medical journals?”

Louis moved restlessly. “There were a lot of warnings about aspirin, too. Adults, and children, have taken overdoses and have died.”

“Louis, for God’s sake! Aspirin doesn’t cause addiction, nor does the taker of a few tablets, even regularly, need desperately to increase his dose. You can die from an overdose of anything—even water, and you know it. But addiction isn’t merely an overdose. It is a craving, a deadly, destroying appetite, which only more and more will satisfy, until the man is killed or kills, or loses his mind. Law authorities are reporting with alarm that drug addiction is one of the main causes of crime. And then you talk about aspirin!”

Louis took out a fretted-silver cigar case and slowly and carefully lit a cigar, not looking at Jonathan. After the cigar was drawing fully, he said, “It was you, Jon, who insisted that six of our best surgeons here at St. Hilda’s and ten of our best attending physicians have their privileges revoked. You had all your ‘facts’ and your figures and your quotations. You impressed the Board; you were very passionate. A majority agreed with you. They were removed from staff. Eight of them were my very good friends.”

“I’m sorry about that. Louis, but I only did what I had to do. I liked those men, personally. But their patients’ welfare had to come first.”

“You might not have been so virtuous, Jonathan, if you had had, among them, a very dear and valued friend. That would have been a horse of another color.”

“No, Louis, it would not. Private emotions end where public welfare begins.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear that,” said Louis Hedler. He smiled, and Jonathan did not like that smile. Louis stood up. “I regret I must tell you this. Tom Harper, one of our most talented and respected surgeons, and one of your closest friends—I believe you lent him money during his last two years—is a drug addict, as you would call him.”

“Tom Harper?” Jonathan was stunned.

“The very same. He had a hard time getting through medical school, didn’t he? His father sold the family farm to finance him. The farm was mortgaged, wasn’t it, so the sum after the sale wasn’t very large. Tom had to work hours after his studies to pay the difference in the fees. His parents died in the most extreme poverty—malnutrition, I think it was. But Tom is one of those dedicated doctors who could never have been anything else, and his family sacrificed, even to their lives. Still, when he was studying surgery, he got married. A nice girl, one of our nurses. She, too, worked to put him through. A desperate situation. He was already thirty-six years old when they were married, and he was still here, interning. Then they had children— Very unfortunate. Four of them. You’d think a doctor would be more careful. How old is he now? Middle forties? Yes. Unfortunate. Let me give you the facts of his ‘addiction,’ Jonathan, and his accidents in the operating room. Perhaps you will find it in your heart to be more tolerant, as I wished to be tolerant about my own close friends.”