The Story of Dr. Wassell

by James Hilton

  JAMES HILTON

  THE STORY OF DR. WASSELL

  First published by Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1943

  * * *

  SOON after he returned to America in July 1942 I spent a few days almost continuously with Dr. Wassell for the purpose of obtaining the material on which this story is based. I had also interviewed some of the men from the Marblehead (their names are fictional in the story), and had visited Arkansas and talked intimately to many of the doctor’s friends and relatives, including his wife and his mother. I did not expect that a task begun so documentarily would become, in retrospect, an almost spiritual experience, but it happened; and therefore I dedicate this story to the hero of it, not only in admiration for his courage, but in personal gratitude for an enrichment of faith during difficult days.

  * * *

  THE STORY OF DR. WASSELL

  FOREWORD

  CORYDON WASSELL was born on July 4 (a good date), 1884, at Little Rock, Arkansas—a good place that can also claim Douglas MacArthur as one of its sons. The Wassell family came originally from Kidderminster, England, and the “Corydon” came from well, nobody seems to know.

  Young Cory enjoyed a mixed education and a wandering youth; he did not decide on a profession till he was twenty-two. Then he studied at Johns Hopkins, after which he graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1909 and began practising in the small Arkansas village of Tillar.

  For the next five years he faced the usual struggles, problems, and hardships of a young doctor, but he was a gay sort of fellow, fond of a good time and a good story, and by no means depressed by a world in which the desires of the few so manifestly outweigh the needs of the many. He did, however, find himself taking sides in it—rather as Moliére’s M. Jourdain found himself talking prose in it—with a naďve unawareness that anything so natural to him could be given a name. But it could, and doubtless was; and meanwhile he went his own way, working hard, enjoying life, and acquiring considerable popularity among those who could not pay their bills. Two things he did are worth special mention: he organized a sort of group-medicine scheme for Negro workers, and he married a village schoolteacher.

  One day in 1913 the President of Suchow University came to Tillar and talked in the Episcopal Church about the needs of China. After the meeting the doctor found himself taking sides again—the same side, actually, though at the other side of the world. His wife being in full agreement, they both left Arkansas as prospective missionaries a few months later to make a new home at Wuchang, on the Yangtze River. Here the doctor studied Chinese, worked in the hospital at Boone University, and raised a family.

  Except for a short furlough in 1919 (during which his fourth child, a son, was born at Little Rock), Dr. Wassell spent in all a dozen years in China. Four of them were European War years—all of them were Chinese war years. He did a great many things during this time. He learned to love the Chinese people, and to derive a great personal happiness from being among them; he diagnosed, treated, and operated at hospitals; he took a course in neurology at Peking Medical College and studied parasitology at Hunan Yale; he published articles on encephalitis in medical journals and examined thousands of snails in a search for the carrier of amoebic dysentery; he taught Chinese students, both in Chinese and in English; he mixed well with American and English residents, and had no trouble in avoiding religious friction with Buddhists and Catholics. He was perhaps every other inch a missionary. Presently he resigned from the society and took on the triple tasks of port doctor at Kukiang, consultant in a Catholic hospital, and a private practice; there were changes too in his personal life, for his wife had died, and he married again—an American missionary-nurse (his present wife); and all the time he was intermittently mixed up with war and revolution as well as with disease and pestilence, so that he served with equal readiness a Chinese army at the front and a British Consulate in a besieged concession…a busy, varied, arduous career, confusing only if you look at it as anything but that of a man trying to be of constant use during times and in a country both confusing and confused.

  (And—significantly for what happened later—he joined the U. S. Naval Reserve.)

  In 1927 confusion, reaching a climax, drove him home—back to Little Rock, where he had another fling at private practice and earned just enough in the first six months to pay his office rent. Soon, however, a county job fell to him, and this was much better—that of organizing and officering a public health system in the schools. But once again—and again with something of M. Jourdain’s unawareness—the doctor found himself a pioneer. This time, in addition to the Negro, there was the Catholic, and the man of any race or religion who couldn’t afford a two-dollar fee for immunization against a diphtheria epidemic. Dr. Wassell championed them all—not as a crusader, but as a public-health official who very simply believed it was his duty to safeguard public health.

  Then came the Depression, when dollars were even scarcer and diseases even more plentiful. Malaria spread in parts of Arkansas, and on account of his Chinese experience Dr. Wassell was given the job of fighting it in local CCC camps, one of which was established in quarterboats on the Mississippi and nicknamed “the CCC Navy.” Here he made many young friends and was almost as happy as he had been in China.

  But there was another Navy that he had not forgotten and that had not forgotten him. In 1936, at the age of fifty-two, he resumed regular commissioned duty, and 1940 (the CCC era ended) saw him at Key West, serving on a submarine inspection board and wondering if the Navy would think him too old for a real job if a real war emergency should arise.

  The blurred line of destiny becomes a little clearer now. In September 1941 he was ordered to Cavite, and was to have sailed from San Francisco on the morning of December 7. That sailing was delayed, and that destination changed. It had to be Java instead—and at the end of January.

  On February 4 the cruisers Houston and Marblehead were in action off the Java coast. Badly battered by a much heavier Japanese force, they yet managed to limp into port, and Dr. Wassell, just arrived on the island, was among those detailed to take care of many wounded men.

  “Dr. Wassell,” said the President in a broadcast speech to the nation on the twenty-eighth of April, 1942, “remained with these men, knowing that he would be captured by the enemy. But he decided to make a desperate attempt to get the men out of Java. He asked each of them if he wished to take the chance and every one agreed. He first had to get the twelve men to the seacoast. The men were suffering severely, but Dr. Wassell kept them alive by his skill and inspired them by his own courage. As the official report said, Dr. Wassell was ‘almost like a Christ-like shepherd devoted to his flock.’”

  * * * * *

  THE STORY OF DR. WASSELL

  THE men from the Marblehead looked up from their cots and wondered what the doctor would be like. They were wounded, burned, and suffering; thousands of miles from home, in a strange country among people who spoke strange languages; their ship had been smashed up, and the battle lost for their side. Pain, defeat, and loneliness had leagued against them during the journey from Tjilatjap, on the coast, to the inland hospital; there they had been skillfully patched up by Dutch surgeons, and a certain measure of sad tranquillity had come upon them. The Dutch were very kind, and the Javanese nurses flitted about like little friendly animals. But what had really cheered them considerably, after so much disaster, was the news that an American Navy Doctor had been assigned to take care of them all.

  When you are ill and in pain and have to have things done for you, the personality of a doctor becomes of absorbing interest. If you have time to wonder about him in advance, you cannot help idealizing; and the picture is hound to be the image of your own ideals. To McGuffey, Ship’
s Cook, whose injuries were slighter than those of the others, the doctor must surely be a big burly fellow, an earth-bound superman with strong hands and a deep black voice, like the bark of a retriever dog; because that was the kind of man and dog McGuffey loved. To Francini, Second Class Seaman, the image was a little different. His prewar ambitions had been to study mathematics and become a gunnery officer; now his earthly desire, almost the only one he could find room for, was to ease the pain of shrapnel wounds; but all this did not prevent him from picturing the doctor as a quiet, scholarly man, one who could take in the problems of the human body and solve them like some vast quadratic equation.

  And so with all the others, though few of them guessed and none confessed that such pictures were shaping in their minds. But when they knew that the doctor was to visit them they looked up with curious eagerness at the sound of new footsteps along the corridor. And presently he came.

  For a fraction of a second before they saw him they saw his cigarette in a long white holder; and because none of them had expected that, it prepared them for other unexpected things. But the unexpected was naturally the disappointing, because when you have imagined perfection anything different must be rather a pity. The men thought the doctor’s entire appearance was rather a pity. There was nothing striking about him, except perhaps his ears, which were rather large. McGuffey, whose own right ear had been partly burned off by a bomb blast, could not help noticing them especially. Furthermore, he dressed neither carelessly nor smartly enough to inspire a legend; his open shirt and light trousers were just unimpressively neat, and he walked into the ward with an almost apologetic air, as if he were not quite sure he had found the right place.

  Moreover, not only was there this long cigarette holder, but he leaned over the rail of one of the end beds and began, in a slow, drawling voice: “Morning, boys.” He then gave his name, adding: “But just call me Doc or Commander—anything you like.” (McGuffey thought cynically: “I’ll call you something if you don’t stop dropping ashes all over my bed…”) The doctor went on, gaining confidence as he heard his own voice: “The main thing is for you to know that I’m here to help you. So cheer up—our number’s on top—everything’s going to be all right from now on. Of course the Dutch doctors are in charge of your treatment.” (“Thank God for that!” thought McGuffey.) “My job’s just to look after you in a general sort of way. So don’t worry, we’ll have you all well again in no time.”

  A little sigh was already running through the minds of the men from the Marblehead . The old stuff. Nothing wrong about it, of course, and had it been barked out in a quarter-deck voice it would have sounded well enough, and perhaps even stimulating. But in that curious slow drawl and with the long cigarette holder, it carried a whiff of unconvincingness.

  McGuffey, shrugging his shoulders under the bedcovers, thought openly: “Just our luck, on top of everything else, to get a fellow like that…”

  And the doctor at that moment was thinking much the same kind of thing about his job. To begin with, he could not quite size up what he had to do, for the hospital was so well-equipped and the Dutch staff were so obviously competent that there did not seem likely to be many tasks left over for him. And that, in a way, caused his initial misgiving—not a cynical one, but rather a degree of humility based on the plain fact that all his life he had had jobs that had come to nothing much (like the amoebic dysentery research in China), or had petered out (like the CCC Camp), or had just failed to click into anything that could be called success. He had never wasted time in self- pity, but he had to recognize, midway through his fifties, that the confidence with which it was natural for him to tackle new things was not, as a rule, justified by results. Perhaps also (but again without self-pity) he had been a shade unlucky in some of his affairs. At any rate, he had been on too many losing sides to feel that his partisanship brought luck to anyone else.

  Actually it had been sheer luck (or unluck, whichever way one looked at it) that had handed him this present job. He had been sorting out medical supplies on the docks at Surabaya when he had come across a case labeled ‘IODINE that, when opened, was found to contain torpedo noses. Such a thing was serious, with its possible implications of sabotage, and he was just entering the Admiral’s office to report the matter when the Admiral himself chanced to be desperately looking for a doctor. The conversation that ensued did not quite reach the torpedo noses.

  “Ah, a doctor—good—”

  “Yes, sir, but—

  “Never mind who you are you’re just the man I’m looking for—

  “Yes, sir, but I’ve come to—

  “Don’t care what you’ve come for—I must have a man at the upcountry hospital—”

  “But, sir—

  “Dutch hospital—our men—mostly from the Marblehead . Must have a doctor as liaison officer. You’ll do. Go there at once.”

  “Yes, sir, but what I really came for was to report about a case of—”

  “No time for reports. Send ‘em in later. There’s a plane leaving in half an hour.”

  “But—”

  But the Admiral had gone, leaving the doctor with a torpedo nose in his pocket (just to prove his case if he had ever been able to get so far) and an unmistakable order ringing in his ears. “Go there at once. There’s a plane leaving in half an hour.”

  So he had caught the plane, and here he was, at the hospital, staring at the men whom it was his mission, in some vague way, to look after. Well, he thought, there was one thing about the Navy: if you simply obeyed orders, you were all right; you daren’t do less and you weren’t expected to do more. And those boys, being of the Navy, would know that as well as he did.

  Another thing he made up his mind about (remembering certain incidents in his past career)—he would keep on the right side of the red-tape machine, even if it meant hours at the job he hated most in his life, which was the filling up of official forms. And forthwith, as if to symbolize future good behaviour, he took out a notebook and began to walk between the rows of beds, taking down particulars of name, age, rank. record, religion, and so on, from all who were able to give them.

  Thus the doctor met the men from the Marblehead , and perhaps all save one, after that first personal meeting, were confirmed a little in their disappointment. The exception was Sun, a Chinese mess attendant, terribly burned by a bomb explosion that had flashed through the Marblehead’s galley several days before. Sun had made no murmur since then, not even during the day-long ordeal of the journey from Tjilatjap; he had let the Dutch doctors work over him without flinching, which was foolish in a way, for had he showed signs of pain they would have given him extra shots to relieve it.

  Sun had expected nothing, or rather he had been prepared for anything, and that was why, when the doctor spoke a few words in Chinese at his bedside, he did not even seem surprised.

  The doctor went away and copied all the necessary information from his notebook into the official documents that he would later take personally to Navy headquarters in Surabaya. He wrote slowly, laboriously, and with a great awareness of duty being performed. Then he visited another ward where some less serious cases from the Marblehead , and also some from the Houston , had been placed. He made similar notes on these, for he was liaison officer to the whole bunch, forty-two in all. But like every doctor he felt drawn to those who needed him most, and he was soon back in the “serious” ward for a second and less formal visit. It was a fact also that he enjoyed talking almost as much as he hated writing, and now, with the load of writing off his mind, he could indulge himself by chatting pleasantly from bed to bed, with a cheery word and a smile to those who could answer, a smile without words to those too ill to listen, and a glance of sympathetic appraisal over those who were still unconscious. During this second visit, the men began to forget their earlier idealizations, and it was a definite step towards liking him. He seemed especially interested in where their homes were, and when one of them said Arkansas, the doctor immediately asked what coun
ty, and, when that was named also, answered in triumph: “Sure, I know it! I had my first practice near there thirty years ago. Plantation job—mostly colored patients—couldn’t pay me anything, often as not—I used to get ‘em to dump a load of wood in my yard, or a sack of potatoes, or maybe a chicken for Sunday dinner—it was less trouble than botherin’ ‘em for money. Yes, I had a pretty tough time, what with all the household chores and ridin’ miles over the hills to some little cabin—but I’ll tell you what, I had a good horse, so I never needed to keep awake only one way if I was called out in the middle of the night—that old horse would bring me home safe while I was fast asleep—like he knew every road and creek and overhangin’ tree in the county. Never had a horse like him before or since…”

  The Arkansas boy, whose name was Hanrahan, had too many facial bandages to smile, but his one visible eye lightened as the doctor went on gossiping.

  Presently his neighbor, who had been listening, interrupted: “Was that Chinese you were speaking just now, Doc?”

  The doctor swung round. “Sure it was—I lived in China for years—I was a medical missionary out there…But I’m a regular Arkansas razorback for all that.”

  Hanrahan’s eye gleamed again.

  Before he left the ward he addressed the men again from the rail of McGuffey’s bed nearest to the door. “You boys all remember now I’m here to help you—anything you want, don’t stand on ceremony, you’ve only got to tell me and I’ll do it if I can—that is, if it’s not against the rules.” He saw that McGuffey was giving him a half-impudent look. “Well, McGuffey, what’s on your mind? Anything you want?”

  “Plenty, sir, only you wouldn’t like to hear about it.”

  There were a few laughs, but not very many, for the men were not exactly in a laughing mood. The doctor ignored the reply, because he had met McGuffey’s type before (or thought he had); they were apt to be a nuisance if you gave any encouragement to their “freshness.” He waited a moment, hoping somebody else would say something. Then, from far down the ward, came the deep melancholy voice of Goode, who had lost an eye.