“Now let’s take a look at your nose.”
I put a finger on her flattened nose and she laughed. Both sides clear.
Now came the tricky part. From the way she held her head, it looked like her left ear was giving her pain. If the examination made the pain worse, the game was over.
“Yas, I’m going to look at your good ear. Let’s see, I’ll bet it’s this one.”
I pointed at her right ear and she nodded.
I took a quick look. Canal and drum were fine.
“Now, Yas, I’m going to need your help. I have to look at the ear that hurts you. I’ll be as quick as I can, but if it hurts, you tell me.”
This time I didn’t pull back on her ear. I directed my scope light into the canal and saw the characteristic signs of a pretty bad infection. Fortunately the ear drum hadn’t ruptured yet.
Those puppy-dog brown eyes kept looking right at me, as I sat down and faced her parents.
“Yasmin has a bad middle-ear infection. She gets a lot of them, doesn’t she?”
Both parents nodded.
“Did you know about her condition before she was born?”
Nabila got right to the point.
“Why do you ask, Doctor?”
Then Lon got there as well.
“Did we do something wrong?”
I could see the frowns on both their faces. This couple had been hurt by the stupidity of others. I shook my head.
“Yasmin is one very special and lucky little girl. I am amazed at how well behaved and cooperative she is. It takes a remarkable couple to raise a child with Down’s syndrome.”
Sometimes having too much of a good thing is not good.
We walk upright and call ourselves humans, because of the presence of forty-six genetic control panels lurking inside every one of our body’s cells, save two: sperm and egg. Our chromosomes contain the blueprints and operating systems that make us what we are. Damage even one of those control panels—or change it—and what results is a blessing to one or an abomination to another.
It used to be called Mongolism, because the child’s facial features resulted from a replicated control panel called Chromosome 21. Those who specialize in the study of chromosomes—the geneticists—call it Trisomy 21.
This genetic flip of the dice can occur in several ways. When Papa’s sperm, with its twenty-three chromosomes, bursts through the defenses of Mama’s ovum, also containing twenty-three chromosomes, the process allows a separate, new life to begin.
With Down’s syndrome, Chromosome 21 mysteriously splits, creating an extra copy, and three in all.
Mother Nature had played that trick on Yasmin, but the Thomases had greeted her as a treat.
Yes, she had her limitations. Her voice was somewhat hoarse because of thick vocal cords. She never achieved the level of conscious deceit that other kids do, as they hit their preteens. Like George Washington, Yasmin could not tell a lie.
I asked Nabila and Lon to tell me the story of their child’s birth.
Nabila’s Eastern European voice filled me in.
“Those oh-so-smart doctors said I wasn’t pregnant. For three months, I tell them I am pregnant, and they say, ‘No, you’re not.’ When they see me at six months, they say, ‘Hot damn, you’re pregnant!’”
“What was worse,” Lon added, “when Yasmin was born, this young doctor comes in, looks at us, and asks us when we thought things had gone wrong.”
“Yah, he says the word ‘wrong.’ Lon looks at him and I’m afraid Lon would punch doctor. Lon is sweetheart but don’t get him angry!”
The big guy’s face broke into a broad grin.
“I think the doctor stepped back when I asked what was wrong with him. Then he says ‘Your daughter is a Mongoloid. She has Down’s syndrome. We’ll help you put her up for adoption.’”
I wasn’t surprised. As I have learned many times, intelligence doesn’t automatically convey common sense.
“What did you tell him, Mr. Thomas?”
“Call me Lon, Dr. Galen. I told him in my own inimitable way to get lost.”
Nabila shook her finger at him.
“No, you told doctor to go autocopulate!”
“You’ve always had a way with words, my love,” he replied
We laughed. I wrote a prescription for eardrops to relieve the pain and shrink Yasmin’s swollen drum. I also prescribed an antibiotic. Children with Down’s syndrome are much more susceptible to bad infections of the ears.
We talked a while more, as the Thomases filled me in on their own lives
Lon was one of those rare humans whose voice could charm Satan himself. Using his voice professionally, he had played the unseen narrator for countless radio and television commercials and programs. Tune in to The Learning Channel, the National Geographic Channel, and others and almost certainly you’ll hear his mellifluous voice.
Nabila was another rara avis. She was a child of the world, spending her youth in European, Middle Eastern, and southern Asian countries. A polyglot linguist, well grounded in philosophy and political science, she served as a war correspondent and photographer who went where angels and men feared to tread.
When they left, Yasmin was humming an unidentifiable tune and happily licking a lollipop.
I was tired. It was almost 11 p.m. I headed to the residence part of my not-so-vast complex.
“I didn’t hear any screaming or angry rants, Tony. What did you do wrong?”
“Mrs. Galen, let me show you what’s wrong.”
And I did. Then she showed me what was right.
Afterward, Cathy drifted into peaceful sleep, but my troubled mind rode a nightmare of memory.
“Hey, City Boy, ever breed animals?”
“Huh?”
“Animals, you know … cows, pigs, chickens.”
“Why? You got some illegitimate kids no one knows about?”
Dave, my medical school roommate, pushed me off the tree stump I was sitting on and tried to “wrassle me”—as folk in his part of the world called it—until I got the upper hand and pinned him down. He was taller, but I was stronger.
It was early spring of our third year, and we had one of those rare, two-day weekends off from ward duty. Why stay in Richmond, when that quiet, rural haven was only four hours away? Besides, we were so church-mouse poor that gasoline, even at twenty-five cents a gallon, was a stretch.
So I showed Dave how we used to survive in my old neighborhood. I took him to some vacant lots—as well as some areas no sensible human would traverse—to scavenge soda and beer bottles. It didn’t take long to accumulate enough in deposit returns for the couple of bucks we needed fill up the tank of his Volkswagen beetle.
Voilà! Road trip.
Later, he returned the favor by demonstrating what he did with bottles. He picked up a pebble then took a gadget out of his back pocket—a whittled, Y-shaped tree branch onto which he had tied two pieces of an old tire inner tube connected to a small leather pouch.
A sling shot!
He popped that stone into the pouch, took aim, and shattered a pop bottle he had perched on the fence rail. I stopped him before he could send a poor little gray squirrel sitting peacefully in a tree to squirrel heaven.
We wrassled again. I pinned him again.
“So tell me about animal breeding, Country Boy. And don’t say anything about past girlfriends, or I might tell Connie.”
He pointed out across the pasture.
“See those cows, City Boy?”
“Sho’nuff, Lum.”
“Well, listen up, Abner,” he replied, playing the second half of a popular radio twosome. “Cows didn’t look like that when they first became cows. We humans bred ’em for the things we wanted: size, ease of feeding and calving, and more.”
“I’m not sure you’d have made it past the selection process.”
“Strange you should say that. Did I ever tell you about my Uncle Andrew?”
“Nope,” I said, picking up a blade of grass to
chew on.
“Why don’t we go visit him?”
I froze for a moment.
“Please, tell me he’s not a conjer man.”
I was referring to Aunt Hattie, the strange old woman Dave had taken me to visit the year before—the woman who had warned me about the Bone Man.
“No, but it’ll be an experience. Come on.”
We dropped by the house to let Dave’s mother know we’d be gone for a while, then we drove off in the VW. It took two hours, but we were still young enough to enjoy pointless driving. Dave pulled up to the gray, castle-like, multi-storied hospital and parked.
“Is your uncle sick, Dave?”
“They think so.”
Then I realized where we were, though I had never been there before. I had heard about the place in lectures back at school. It was a state-run hospital established to treat and hold what were called the most “difficult” cases, as they were commonly called.
We showed our medical-school ID badges to the guard, who passed us through a locked iron gate into the main corridor. It was lit by naked light bulbs dangling from wires. Down the hallway we approached a large room euphemistically labeled SUN PARLOR.
We passed another guard and entered a gray-painted, cinderblock space highlighted with one small window covered by iron bars inside and out. Within its confines men and women had congregated in striped gray pajama-like outfits. They shuffled back and forth, leaned with their heads against the wall and, in some cases, banged those heads at rhythmic intervals.
My skin crawled. This was the therapeutic equivalent of Dachau, Buchenwald, and more.
We approached a man sitting on the floor, swaying back and forth. At first, I thought he was a child. His head was small—it didn’t fit the large body beneath it. His face was like a blank sheet of paper, devoid of emotion behind eyes. He saw nothing of our world.
Dave turned to me.
“This is my Uncle Andrew.”
He crouched down and spoke to the distorted creature.
The man didn’t reply.
Dave turned to me as he rose.
“So how do you like my uncle, Bob?”
I looked around at the inhabitants of that room: incomplete, human jigsaw puzzles whose very appearance assaulted the eyes.
“Who are these people?”
He took hold of my arm.
“Come on, let’s get outta here.”
As we drove back to the farm, I listened as a side of my friend emerged—one I had never seen or heard before.
“Bob, remember when you joked that I wouldn’t have made the cut in a breeding exercise?”
I nodded and tried to inject some levity by muttering “I didn’t know you were a cow, Dave. All bull, yes…”
The look on his face shut me up.
“Bob, I wasn’t supposed to be born. The State of Virginia had declared that my family was defective.”
I stared at him for a moment.
“What are you talking about?”
My incredulity offended him.
“City Boy, you’ve got a lot to learn about history. Just shut up and let me talk, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Andrew is my father’s older brother. As you saw, somehow he wasn’t right from the day he was born. Even now I can’t explain what went wrong to make him like that.”
He hesitated.
“You know about Eugenics?”
Yes, I knew. Two decades before, the world had barely defeated a monster who sought to conquer it with his Aryan ubermensch. I also knew that my own family—my ethnic group, as they say today—was not really wanted in the U.S. of A., when they arrived here in 1914. The leaders back then feared our genes would pollute the superior Anglo-Saxon/Nordic stock.
Then Dave delivered his blockbuster.
“Both my parents were, by state law, supposed to be sterilized so that their so-called defects wouldn’t get passed on. Virginia was in the forefront of laws passed to prevent the spread of deviance, imbecility, feeble-mindedness, perversion and epilepsy.”
“Your mother’s side, too?”
“Yep, Ma has a cousin with Down’s syndrome. According to the political geniuses back then, her entire family was supposed to be sterilized—neutered—so that no more generations could be produced by inferior stock. They sent Aunt Beth to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Lynchburg. She was forcibly sterilized there.
“Bob, all those people you saw at the hospital have been sterilized by state mandate. And guess what? That late unlamented bastard Hitler based his ideas for a master race on the scientific papers of so-called eugenics philosophers and doctors in the United States—especially Virginia!”
I let that remark sink in.
“Look, Dave, you’re here, so obviously nothing happened to your parents, right?”
He pulled the car off the road, turned off the engine, and turned to me.
“My folks hid out in the mountains until I was born. Only then was it safe to return home. The rest of my relatives went under the kni…”
He broke down into tears.
We sat in silence for awhile. Then I got out and walk around to the driver’s side. He slid across to the passenger seat, and I drove the rest of the way.
I felt tired when we reached the little farmhouse. The first thing Dave did when we walked in the door was surprise his parents with hugs. Then he headed for his room and stayed there the rest of the day.
That Sunday, I joined Dave and his family at the little Baptist church five miles down the road.
I saw faces in the congregation, faces not quite right, wrinkled by time. I wondered whether the state had improved its gene pool by neutering them.
The next week, back in Richmond, we sneaked out of a midday medical conference and walked down Broad Street to the Virginia State Library. Our med school IDs gained us entry and help from the reference librarian.
It took awhile. This was long before the days of computerized data searches, let alone Google and online research, but she knew what she was doing. Soon she presented us with a stack of documents and brittle, brown newspapers from the early 1920s.
We stretched them out before us on the long, dark-oak table.
The cold, black print contained articles about the Virginia laws we sought, including the 1924 Sterilization Act and the 1927 Buck versus Bell case against involuntary sterilization, where even the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, sided with the sterilization advocates.
Our eyes widened as we saw the names of prominent doctors, including some of our own professors and the man who headed the American Medical Association, all of whom supported the laws when they were enacted.
Then Dave pointed at another paper.
“You wouldn’t be here, either, Bob.”
I looked down at the title of the law authorized by Congress: The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. It specifically sought to limit the entry into the United States of “dysgenic Italians and Eastern European Jews.”
Although not included in the act, its advocates strongly recommended the involuntary sterilization of “ethnic defectives.”
A cold chill enveloped me, and I had to sit down.
And then I awoke in a sweat, realizing that I had been dreaming part of my painful reverie.
“What’s wrong, Tony?”
“N … nothing,” I stammered, “just a bad dream.”
It really wasn’t, but I couldn’t tell her—not then. The monstrosity of what those so-called scientists and social-planning elites had done staggered me.
Beethoven, St. Paul the apostle and, irony of ironies, some of those who had supported eugenics, such as Alexander Graham Bell and Winston Churchill—and even that Austrian paper-hanger named Adolph—would not have existed had those restrictions been imposed before they were born.
Even worse was the law of unintended consequences. The mass sterilizations and human destruction of the Third Reich, even Ha Shoah—The Holoca
ust—had stemmed from the eugenics laws that originated here, in the Land of the Free.
The turning away of boatloads of Jewish refugees, and their subsequent torture and death at the hands of a psychopath, was due to the mindset of a Southern Democrat congressional coalition that persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to refuse them entry—because they were “racially undesirable.”
The next day I worked through a full patient load. Then, as things quieted down, Barbara called out from the waiting room.
“Dr. Galen, please pick up the phone.”
“Who is it?”
“Lon Thomas.”
“Dr. Galen, Nabila and I wanted you to know that Yasmin is much better … and that we wanted to thank you … for understanding.”
Over the years the Thomas family visited me many more times, and they gave me the pleasure that can be enjoyed only by a doctor whose practice allows for following children as they grow and mature.
Yasmin Thomas grew into an amazing adult. No, she was not an Einstein, but thanks to her parents, who disregarded the shameful ignorance displayed by the medical profession when she was born, Yasmin became the unexpected treat.
When digital cameras became available, Nabila gave Yasmin a basic one and showed her how to point through the viewfinder and click the shutter.
So Yasmin would walk through crowds of people, seeing the world through those almond guileless eyes.
Point/click. Point/click.
She hummed to herself, as she captured fascinating—and unfiltered—views of people and life. Birds and insects did not fly away, as she aimed her camera’s electronic memory at them. People who spent their entire lives masking their feelings from others seemed not to want to hide from the lens of that innocent mind.
The truth was Yasmin’s Song.
Justice Is
“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, “the law is a ass—a idiot.”
—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, chapter 51 (1837–1839)
“I find the defendant guilty.”
I sat there in the back of the small, county courtroom. The wooden benches were uncomfortably hard, and the slightly blue-violet glow of the fluorescent lights produced a migraine-inducing flicker. Also, the air conditioning wasn’t working, so the sweaty aroma of several previous trials lent an overcast atmosphere to the legal purgatory.
Dr. Galen's Little Black Bag Page 12
