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Authors: John Irving
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was both medically and philosophically sound.
In the same year, 188-, that Wilbur Larch became a doctor, Neal Dow died. In grief, Wilbur Larch's mother shortly followed her temperance hero to the grave. A few days later, Wilbur's father auctioned every item from their servants' rooms in the former mayor's mansion and rode the Grand Trunk Railway to Montreal, a town less temperance-minded than Portland, and where Wilbur Larch's father pushed his liver beyond limits. His body was returned to Portland on the same Grand Trunk Railway that had carried the former lathe operator away. Wilbur Larch met the train; he played the porter to his father's remains. From the near-cadavers of the cirrhotic that he had seen during his first internship, young Dr. Larch knew exactly what must have been his father's condition at the end. Cirrhosis turns the liver to a mass of scars and lumps, the skin reflects the bile of jaundice, the stools lighten, the urine darkens, the blood doesn't clot. Dr. Larch doubted that his father would have even noticed the accompanying impotence.
How moving to conclude that young Larch chose to be an obstetrician because the loss of his parents inspired him to bring more children into the world, but the road that led Larch to obstetrics was strewn with bacteria. The demonstrator of bacteriology at Harvard Medical School, a Dr. Harold Ernst, is best remembered as one of the first college baseball pitchers to throw a curve ball; he was also the first college baseball player to become a bacteriologist. In the early morning laboratory, before Dr. Ernst—the former curve-ball pitcher—would arrive to set up his demonstrations, young Wilbur Larch would be all alone. He didn't feel alone in the presence of so many bacteria growing in the little Petri dishes, in the presence of the bacteria inhabiting his urethra and his prostate gland.
He would milk a drop of pus from his penis onto an {61} ordinary stained slide. Magnified more than a thousand times, the villains he spotted every morning under the microscope were still smaller thsm common red ants.
Years later Larch would write that the gonococci looked stooped, like too-tall visitors in ain igloo. ('They bend,' he wrote, 'as if they have waists and are bowing to each other.')
Young Larch would stare at his pus until Dr. Ernst would arrive and greet his little living experiments all over the lab (as if they were his old baseball teammates).
'Honestly, Larch,' the famous bacteriologist said one morning, 'the way you look into that microscope, you appear to be plotting revenge.'
But it was not the smirk of vengeance that Dr. Ernst recognized on Wilbur Larch's face. It was simply the intensity with which Larch was emerging; from his etherdaze. The young medical student had discovered that the light, tasty vapor was a safe, effective killer of his pain. In his days spent fighting the dancing gonococci, Larch had become quite a knowledgeable imbiber of ether. By the time the fierce bacteria had burned themselves out, Larch was an ether addict. He was an open-dropmethod man. With one hand he held a cone over his mouth and nose; he made this mask himself (by wrapping many layers of gauze around a cone of stiff paper); with his other hand, he wet the cone. He used a quarterpound ether can punctured with a safety pin; the drops that fell from the elbow of the safety pin fell in exactly the correct size and at exactly the correct rate:.
It was the way he would give ether to his patients, too, except that he gave himself much less; when the hand that held the ether can felt unsteady, he put the can down; when the hand that held the cone over his mouth and nose dropped to his side, the cone fell off his face—it wouldn't stay in place if no one held it, He felt nothing of the panic that a patient being anesthetized with ether experiences—he never approached the moment when there wasn't enough air to breathe. Before {62} that happened, he always dropped the mask.
When
In the same year, 188-, that Wilbur Larch became a doctor, Neal Dow died. In grief, Wilbur Larch's mother shortly followed her temperance hero to the grave. A few days later, Wilbur's father auctioned every item from their servants' rooms in the former mayor's mansion and rode the Grand Trunk Railway to Montreal, a town less temperance-minded than Portland, and where Wilbur Larch's father pushed his liver beyond limits. His body was returned to Portland on the same Grand Trunk Railway that had carried the former lathe operator away. Wilbur Larch met the train; he played the porter to his father's remains. From the near-cadavers of the cirrhotic that he had seen during his first internship, young Dr. Larch knew exactly what must have been his father's condition at the end. Cirrhosis turns the liver to a mass of scars and lumps, the skin reflects the bile of jaundice, the stools lighten, the urine darkens, the blood doesn't clot. Dr. Larch doubted that his father would have even noticed the accompanying impotence.
How moving to conclude that young Larch chose to be an obstetrician because the loss of his parents inspired him to bring more children into the world, but the road that led Larch to obstetrics was strewn with bacteria. The demonstrator of bacteriology at Harvard Medical School, a Dr. Harold Ernst, is best remembered as one of the first college baseball pitchers to throw a curve ball; he was also the first college baseball player to become a bacteriologist. In the early morning laboratory, before Dr. Ernst—the former curve-ball pitcher—would arrive to set up his demonstrations, young Wilbur Larch would be all alone. He didn't feel alone in the presence of so many bacteria growing in the little Petri dishes, in the presence of the bacteria inhabiting his urethra and his prostate gland.
He would milk a drop of pus from his penis onto an {61} ordinary stained slide. Magnified more than a thousand times, the villains he spotted every morning under the microscope were still smaller thsm common red ants.
Years later Larch would write that the gonococci looked stooped, like too-tall visitors in ain igloo. ('They bend,' he wrote, 'as if they have waists and are bowing to each other.')
Young Larch would stare at his pus until Dr. Ernst would arrive and greet his little living experiments all over the lab (as if they were his old baseball teammates).
'Honestly, Larch,' the famous bacteriologist said one morning, 'the way you look into that microscope, you appear to be plotting revenge.'
But it was not the smirk of vengeance that Dr. Ernst recognized on Wilbur Larch's face. It was simply the intensity with which Larch was emerging; from his etherdaze. The young medical student had discovered that the light, tasty vapor was a safe, effective killer of his pain. In his days spent fighting the dancing gonococci, Larch had become quite a knowledgeable imbiber of ether. By the time the fierce bacteria had burned themselves out, Larch was an ether addict. He was an open-dropmethod man. With one hand he held a cone over his mouth and nose; he made this mask himself (by wrapping many layers of gauze around a cone of stiff paper); with his other hand, he wet the cone. He used a quarterpound ether can punctured with a safety pin; the drops that fell from the elbow of the safety pin fell in exactly the correct size and at exactly the correct rate:.
It was the way he would give ether to his patients, too, except that he gave himself much less; when the hand that held the ether can felt unsteady, he put the can down; when the hand that held the cone over his mouth and nose dropped to his side, the cone fell off his face—it wouldn't stay in place if no one held it, He felt nothing of the panic that a patient being anesthetized with ether experiences—he never approached the moment when there wasn't enough air to breathe. Before {62} that happened, he always dropped the mask.
When
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