by Ann Walsh
I sighed. I knew that look well. In spite of my wishes, I suspected I would soon resume my studies. Some of the books Ma made me read were interesting, ones like The Swiss Family Robinson. But poetry? I didn’t want to have to study poetry.
“J.B.,” I pleaded. “That’s not what you meant, was it? You didn’t mean that I was to go back to lessons, did you?”
The doctor was quiet for a moment before he answered. “Mr. Tennyson, yes, I know his work; very good poetry but very long poetry. And Geography, of course. How about Mathematics? Is Ted’s arithmetic schooling complete, Mrs. MacIntosh?”
“J.B.,” I said again. “Please.”
He laughed, and I realized that once again he was teasing. Ma realized it, too, and she spoke curtly.
“Well, if not with more lessons, Doctor, then how do you propose to keep Theodore’s mind occupied so that he will not dream at night?”
“By having him by my side for most of the day and for some nights as well. It is common for doctors to take an apprentice, a young man who works with them and learns what he can about the profession before he undertakes the rigorous course of studies which will qualify him to be a doctor. I would like Ted to be my unofficial apprentice.”
“Oh, my!” said my mother. She looked at Doctor Wilkinson, then at me, then back at the doctor again. “Oh, my!” she said again. “My son. A doctor.”
“No, not a doctor, Mrs. MacIntosh, but rather a student, a helper, an assistant. I can not possibly teach Ted everything he needs to know, nor would it be legal. Why, just last year an ordinance was passed in New Westminster for all practitioners of medicine. A doctor must have at least three years of study at a college and be officially registered or he may not practise his profession in the Colony of British Columbia. Ted will learn some things from me, but much more study is needed before he can become a physician.”
“It would be an honour if you would select Theodore as your assistant,” my mother said. “I have always wished that there were a man of medicine in the family. Now, perhaps, that wish will come true. If…” The smile left her face and she stared hard at the doctor.
“If what, Mrs. MacIntosh?” he asked, his own face as serious as hers. “If you consider me an appropriate mentor?”
“Well, yes. You must admit, Doctor Wilkinson, that you have had your troubles. A few years ago you were in considerable… distress, were you not?”
“I was. At that time no mother would allow her son to work with me. Nor would I have considered taking on an apprentice. My heart was not in my work and I was, as you so considerately called it, in much distress.”
“And now, Doctor?”
He pushed himself up from the chair, and went to my mother. Gently he put one hand on her arm, and looked her steadily in the eyes.
“Mrs. MacIntosh, my troubles are behind me and I promise that they shall not recur, not ever. I give you my word.”
Ma put her hand over his. “It was a terrible time, both for you and for poor Mr. Cameron.”
What was Ma talking about? I knew Mr. Cameron, ‘Cariboo’ Cameron people called him. But what had J.B. to do with him? And what was the ‘trouble’ Ma kept talking about? I had my mouth open, a question ready, but one look at my mother’s face and I realized that this was not the best time to ask anything.
Ma disentangled her arm from J.B.’s grip. She held out her hand. J.B. took it and they shook hands solemnly. “I will hold you to your word, Doctor,” she said.
“I will keep it. Then may I take Ted as my unofficial apprentice?”
“With my blessing, Doctor.”
“Thank you. Then it is settled. I spoke to Mr. MacIntosh this morning, and he also has agreed. So, now that I have your approval, Mrs. MacIntosh, the deal is debated, decided and done. Ted, put on your boots and jacket and come with me. We’ll start immediately.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I don’t recall expressing any desire to become a doctor or even a doctor’s assistant.”
“Nonsense, Theodore,” said my mother in that tone of voice which meant that she had already made my decision for me. “It will be good for you to learn skills other than those your father can teach you. You do need something to occupy your mind.”
“My mind is well occupied right now,” I said. “I don’t wish to work with J.B.”
“But why not, Ted?” asked the doctor, looking both surprised and hurt at once. “I would enjoy spending more time in your company, and I had assumed the feeling was mutual.”
I thought quickly. “It is just that I don’t know what my duties would be,” I said. “I can not help you with patients. What else is there to do?”
“You will keep the surgery and my instruments clean,” said the doctor, “and help me keep written records of the diagnosis and treatment of each patient as well as their symptoms. You’ll mix the powders and tinctures I prescribe—once you’ve learned the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, that is. You will come with me on house calls when I need someone to handle the horse and buggy and… Oh, there are many things for you to do.”
“But I don’t…” I began, but no one was listening.
“Come along, Ted,” said J.B. as he bid my mother good morning and started out the door.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to do. I pulled on my boots, picked up my jacket, and nervously followed him.
Nervously, because I had a problem. J.B. didn’t know about it yet, although he would find out soon enough. Ma believed I had outgrown it, but I hadn’t. It was something which I was sure was not one of the qualifications which would make me a successful doctor’s apprentice.
I faint at the sight of blood.
Four
“Welcome to my surgery,” said J.B. He unlocked the door of a building between two stores on Barkerville’s main street. “Come in, come in.”
I hung up my jacket and pulled off my boots while the doctor stoked the fire in the wood stove. Although I had been tended to by doctors at home a time or two in the past, I had only once been inside a doctor’s surgery, the time J.B. gave me the laudanum. I hadn’t paid too much attention then, but now I looked around me with more curiosity. At first glance it seemed not unlike any other office, only J.B.’s black leather travelling bag indicated that this was where a doctor worked.
A roll top desk, open to show a dozen pigeonholes crammed with papers, was pushed up against one wall and two chairs were beside the desk. Both the desk and the chairs were covered with books—thin books, thick books, books with tattered covers, leather-bound books. There were piles of books everywhere, even stacked in a corner on the floor.
Close to the stove, beside a small table with a reading lamp, was a cushioned easy-chair with one broken leg. That chair, too, was piled with books; they overflowed onto the table, threatening to nudge the lamp over the edge. Where did J.B. expect his patients to sit, I wondered?
I picked up one of the books, a heavy one. Anatomy of the Human Body it said on the cover. “What is ‘anatomy,’ J.B.?”
“I don’t think anatomy is the best subject to begin with,” he said. “Perhaps we will start with something more suitable to your age. And more, I am certain, to your mother’s liking.” He took the book from my hand and tossed it back onto the chair. A cloud of dust puffed up around my face, and I sneezed.
J.B. looked around him as if he were seeing, for the first time, the books that filled the room. “I think that one of your duties will be to use your carpentry skills and build a bookshelf,” he said. “I suspect that my patients sometimes find it disconcerting to perch on a pile of books—to perch, perhaps painfully, on plentiful piles… Well, enough of that. To work, Ted.”
I looked around me. “But what shall I do?” I asked, sneezing again. “Do you want me to start building the bookshelf now?”
“Certainly not. My consultation hours begin shortly and patients will not want to relate their symptoms against the noise of hammer blows. Or sneezes.”
I sneezed once more. “Mos
t odd,” said J.B. “However, let us forget your sneezes for I have a suggestion as to how you can occupy your time. Come with me.”
We went into a second room, smaller than the first one and even thicker in dust.
“Welcome to my dispensary,” he said. “From this palatial room I dispense dosages for my patients, dreams for myself—for, as you can see, this room is where I sleep—and dinner. Rarely dinner, for I am not a skilled cook.”
Again I looked around me. Crammed into the room were a cook stove, a table covered with an assortment of pots, dishes and empty medicine bottles, and two wooden chests, the largest of them with drawers and a sturdy padlock.
There was also an unmade bed, the blankets bunched up at its foot, and one whole wall of hooks dangling layers of clothing. Two pairs of boots were lined up beneath the clothes, and suspenders and belts were draped over everything, forming a sort of net which, I hoped, served to hold all of the clothes securely and prevent them from tumbling to the ground.
“Perhaps I should also build you a wardrobe,” I said and as I spoke a jacket slipped off the hook on which it was hung and fell to the ground. I tried to hang it back up, but only succeeded in dislodging a shirt and some long underwear.
J.B. took the clothing from my hands and replaced it carefully. “I maintain that wardrobes hinder your ability to find clothes,” he said. “Rather than rummaging rigorously and randomly in a dark cupboard, I hang my clothes where I can see everything at a glance. Besides, although I agree that I am in need of the services of a carpenter, I thought that you were to be my medical helper.”
“I don’t mind building things for you,” I said quickly. “I know more of carpentry than I do of medicine.” I would avoid the blood if I could spend my apprenticeship hammering rather than bandaging, I thought hopefully.
J.B. grinned at me. “Perhaps you will do both. Remember, my intention is to fill you so full of new knowledge and skills that your fears will be pushed out of your busy mind, and your nightmares will end. That was our plan, was it not?”
“Yes,” I admitted reluctantly and sneezed again, loudly.
“I suspect that a good sweeping and dusting will both cure your sneezes and immensely improve the condition of this room. When you have completed those tasks…”
I interrupted before he could finish. “Dusting?” I asked, horrified. “Sweeping?”
“Yes,” he said cheerfully. “First you sweep and then you dust and then…” He pulled the smallest wooden chest to the centre of the room and flung open the lid. Inside were empty bottles and jars, dozens of them in all sizes, shapes and colours, heaped together so they filled the chest almost to the brim.
“I store these here for future use,” he said. “When I prescribe a medication, I mix it from the ingredients I keep safely locked up in this other chest, then I scrounge for both a bottle and a stopper which fits it. That can be a lengthy process since the correct stopper always seems to be beneath everything else. Sometimes, by the time I have found the containers for the medicine, the patient’s illness has worsened or, worse yet, he has grown impatient and left without his medication and without paying my fee.”
I picked up a green bottle, much like the one J.B. had filled with my laudanum. It was dusty, and there was something dark nestled inside it. I turned the bottle upside down and jumped as a large spider fell out.
“Tincture of spider, essence of dust and, perhaps, infusion of mouse droppings,” said the doctor, watching the spider scuttle across the floor. “Although I blow into the bottles before I fill them, to dislodge the dust and any large items which do not belong in my prescription, I am sure that more than one patient has swallowed fly wings along with their sulphur and molasses tonic.”
“Or spider legs,” I said, wondering if I had received a dose of insect limbs with my laudanum.
“You know, Ted, it occurs to me that all of my patients would benefit if you were to spend some time washing all of these containers.”
“Washing?”
“Indeed. You are familiar with the term? Here.” He handed me a bucket and placed a pot on the stove. “While I tend to patients, busy yourself by boiling water and thoroughly cleaning the contents of this treasure chest of mine. After you have swept and dusted, that is. This is a small room, the cleaning will not take long. Later, perhaps, you can install shelves so that my things can be stored more conveniently, but for now, Ted, set a fire, seize the broom and search diligently for cobwebs. But first you must fetch water from outside.”
He grinned at me again and left the room. I picked up another bottle from the jumble in the chest and carefully turned it upside down. No more spiders emerged, but I was sure that I had not seen the last of them.
In the other room I heard the doctor greeting a patient, and then the thud of books hitting the floor as J.B. cleared a chair and offered it to the visitor. Their voices were low and, through the closed door, I could hear only faint mutterings. I sighed and, picking up the bucket, headed outside to the pump.
This was not the work I had expected a doctor’s apprentice to do. This was woman’s work.
My first few days as Doctor Wilkinson’s apprentice were spent doing cleaning and more cleaning, much more than was to my liking. My mother laughed when I told her of my duties and scolded me for complaining.
“A man’s work, a woman’s work, it makes no difference, Ted. If there is a job to be done, then someone has to do it. Perhaps, if you need to practise your new skills, you could spend a few hours helping me with my spring cleaning.”
J.B. didn’t need spring cleaning. He needed it for fall, winter, and summer as well to make up for the years he had neglected to clean anything.
I washed every bottle and jar in his dispensary as well as the dishes, some of which looked as if they hadn’t been near water since they were bought. For more than a week I swept, scrubbed, polished—and sneezed. I moved piles of books and dusted them and became more intimately acquainted with dirt, cobwebs, and even the occasional dead mouse than I had any wish to be.
With my father’s help I built shallow shelves to store J.B.’s bottles and jars and an enormous bookshelf to keep his books off the floor and the furniture. I also put up more hooks for his clothing and moved the bed and the two trunks out of the way so I could scrub the floor with a strong solution of coal-tar soap and hot water. The dispensary and surgery gleamed. J.B. had even been persuaded to commission my father to build him a wardrobe and to repair the broken leg on his favourite chair.
My mother came to town and carried away all of the doctor’s curtains to launder. She took a good look around her and announced that she had assumed that a medical man would be cleaner and better organized, and she hoped that I, when I became a doctor, would have more sense than to let my lodgings fall into such disrepair.
J.B. thanked her for her help. “But you know, Mrs. MacIntosh, all medical students must pass an exam in disorderliness in order to qualify as doctors. We were severely penalized if our quarters were inspected and found to be clean and neat. I found it difficult, but I managed to avoid demerits for tidiness.”
“A great personal sacrifice, I am sure, Doctor,” said my mother, smiling at him. She had come to recognize his tone of voice when he was joking, and was no longer taken in by his teasing.
With J.B.’s surgery and living quarters clean and organized, I spent the next week of my apprenticeship with my nose buried in books. Not the one about anatomy (J.B. had told me to leave that subject alone for now), but books about medicines, herbs, concoctions, and chemicals and their use in the treatment of illnesses.
I did learn the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, also between a pint and a quart, and an ounce and a dram. I learned that when you added a minim of something to a mixture, you added barely a drop and that when an ingredient was to be finely ground the mortar and pestle would reduce it to a powder with only a little effort. By the end of my second week, I was allowed to mix some of the prescriptions myself, at first n
ervously supervised by J.B., then entirely on my own.
I was also given the job of writing out all of J.B.’s instructions, detailing how the medicines he dispensed should be taken, and soon memorized the spelling of such words as laudanum, bicarbonate, quinine, and camphor. I learned how each was used to ease pain, relieve gas, bring down a high fever, or take away the itch of insect bites.
In my measuring and mixing, my hands became stained yellow from the fine powder called ‘flowers of sulphur,’ purple from solutions of potassium permanganate and blotched white from splashes of carbolic acid. The carbolic acid was mixed with water into a solution which J.B. had recently begun using to clean both his hands and a patient’s wounds after reading a newly published paper by Doctor Lister which recommended it. My mother sighed when she saw my hands, and insisted on vigorous washing before she would let me sit at the table to eat, even though I assured her that those were stains, not dirt, and scrubbing would not help.
I learned so much and worked so hard that when I crawled into my bed at night my head was crammed with words: names and terms and measurements. I would dream of how to mix sulphur and molasses for a tonic, of how much peppermint essence to put into a baby’s colic medicine, of how to count the drops of opium when making a tincture of laudanum.
I read. I memorized. I wrote dosage instructions, mixed medications, and kept both the surgery and the dispensary clean. Doctor Wilkinson had been right. I had no room in my head for nightmares. I did not dream of James Barry, in fact I seldom even thought of him.
Five
I had been J.B.’s assistant for almost a month when, shortly before my fourteenth birthday, I went with him to visit a patient.
The call for the doctor came one day near the end of May as J.B. and I were eating our noon meal in Wake up Jake’s. Although I received no pay for my duties as his helper, J.B. made sure that my stomach was well filled.
