Read Online Not Quite Dead by John MacLachlan Gray - Free Book Online
Authors: John MacLachlan Gray
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it is to lose one’s mother. We both know what it was to lose your mother. You will never have as close a friend as I.”
He reached across the table and grasped my hand. “We are brothers. And neither is to blame for what happened. Despite her disposition to melancholy, were it not for your father’s inept physician, Dr. Emory, she would be alive today.”
“Dr. Emory? By God!” I swear that I had not thought of the man in twenty years.
“Ah, so you remember. Dr. Morris Emory was his name. He had extremely thick eyebrows and strangler’s thumbs.”
“Absolutely right! Astonishing!” I followed only intermittently the discourse to follow, for my mind had traveled elsewhere: I cannot say for certain that Poe knew the circumstance of my wife’s death, yet hehad unearthed an uncanny parallel between her fate and that of my mother—the two Mrs. Chivers.
In the same way that Father handed Mother over to Dr. Emory, I had subjected my Lucy to the ministrations of Dr. Prebble—no midwife for me, thank you, only the most modern protocols. And as the journals assured me, there is nothing better than a set of curved forceps to assure safer and shorter accouchement and parturition .
As head surgeon at Washington College Hospital, Prebble had first call on maternity cases, and I never thought to question his ability to carry out this delicate procedure. Only vaguely did it enter my mind that, at the time of Prebble’s arrival and subsequent promotion, President Jackson, in a fit of misplaced egalitarianism, had abolished license requirements for physicians and surgeons— a professional aristocracy , he called it. Thanks to deregulation, a doctor need never have opened a medical text to set up shop, claiming French training and specialized expertise, with no proof required. In an era of unprecedented quackery, I might have demonstrated a more skeptical spirit when it came to the welfare of my own wife and child—especially given his reputation for stumbling or hesitating over commonplace medical terms and phrases.
Yet I agreed. Why? Because not to do so would betray a lack of confidence in my superior.
Fool!
Prebble was most regretful over the hemorrhage, though by no means critical of his own performance. “An unusual case,” he called it. “No one could have predicted a womb of blood with a malignancy of the heart, an unprecedented combination of events to be sure …”
Now, years later, I find myself in his debt. Following my term of military service, it was thanks to Prebble that I was permitted to return to residence, since few medical institutions would overlook my history of mental instability and recent breakdown, however well earned.
For the fact that I am able to practice medicine, I have to thank the man who killed my wife.
I became aware of Eddie watching me closely, as though he knew the journey my mind had taken to the rage within. For the first time since we poached pheasant together on the James River, I felt an exhilarating impulse to do wrong, to rebel. To defy the little life I had been compressed into, the tight, dry little man I had become.
With even the most expert mesmerist, the subject must retain an inner desire to do as the practitioner suggests.
What seems remarkable is not only the readiness with which I collaborated with Poe on a project that could ruin me, but the almost mystical collusion of the institution in enabling us to accomplish it.
Grave , n . A place in which the dead are laid, to await the coming of the medical student.
—Ambrose Bierce
T HE MORGUE AT Washington College Hospital was known to suffer a chronic deficit of cadavers, though the hospital wasted no time or effort in producing them. The school paid well for specimens and showed little curiosity about their place of origin. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that, in the public imagination, the institution had acquired a ghoulish reputation.
Because of our location in proximity to Baltimore’s main
He reached across the table and grasped my hand. “We are brothers. And neither is to blame for what happened. Despite her disposition to melancholy, were it not for your father’s inept physician, Dr. Emory, she would be alive today.”
“Dr. Emory? By God!” I swear that I had not thought of the man in twenty years.
“Ah, so you remember. Dr. Morris Emory was his name. He had extremely thick eyebrows and strangler’s thumbs.”
“Absolutely right! Astonishing!” I followed only intermittently the discourse to follow, for my mind had traveled elsewhere: I cannot say for certain that Poe knew the circumstance of my wife’s death, yet hehad unearthed an uncanny parallel between her fate and that of my mother—the two Mrs. Chivers.
In the same way that Father handed Mother over to Dr. Emory, I had subjected my Lucy to the ministrations of Dr. Prebble—no midwife for me, thank you, only the most modern protocols. And as the journals assured me, there is nothing better than a set of curved forceps to assure safer and shorter accouchement and parturition .
As head surgeon at Washington College Hospital, Prebble had first call on maternity cases, and I never thought to question his ability to carry out this delicate procedure. Only vaguely did it enter my mind that, at the time of Prebble’s arrival and subsequent promotion, President Jackson, in a fit of misplaced egalitarianism, had abolished license requirements for physicians and surgeons— a professional aristocracy , he called it. Thanks to deregulation, a doctor need never have opened a medical text to set up shop, claiming French training and specialized expertise, with no proof required. In an era of unprecedented quackery, I might have demonstrated a more skeptical spirit when it came to the welfare of my own wife and child—especially given his reputation for stumbling or hesitating over commonplace medical terms and phrases.
Yet I agreed. Why? Because not to do so would betray a lack of confidence in my superior.
Fool!
Prebble was most regretful over the hemorrhage, though by no means critical of his own performance. “An unusual case,” he called it. “No one could have predicted a womb of blood with a malignancy of the heart, an unprecedented combination of events to be sure …”
Now, years later, I find myself in his debt. Following my term of military service, it was thanks to Prebble that I was permitted to return to residence, since few medical institutions would overlook my history of mental instability and recent breakdown, however well earned.
For the fact that I am able to practice medicine, I have to thank the man who killed my wife.
I became aware of Eddie watching me closely, as though he knew the journey my mind had taken to the rage within. For the first time since we poached pheasant together on the James River, I felt an exhilarating impulse to do wrong, to rebel. To defy the little life I had been compressed into, the tight, dry little man I had become.
With even the most expert mesmerist, the subject must retain an inner desire to do as the practitioner suggests.
What seems remarkable is not only the readiness with which I collaborated with Poe on a project that could ruin me, but the almost mystical collusion of the institution in enabling us to accomplish it.
Grave , n . A place in which the dead are laid, to await the coming of the medical student.
—Ambrose Bierce
T HE MORGUE AT Washington College Hospital was known to suffer a chronic deficit of cadavers, though the hospital wasted no time or effort in producing them. The school paid well for specimens and showed little curiosity about their place of origin. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that, in the public imagination, the institution had acquired a ghoulish reputation.
Because of our location in proximity to Baltimore’s main
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