American Struggle

by Veda Boyd Jones

  “Did you read these magazines?” Dr. Drake asked.

  “Yes. I—I want to be a doctor when I grow up,” Rob blurted out.

  “Well, well.” Dr. Drake leaned against the porch rail. “I was a bit older than you when I read my cousin’s medical books and decided the same thing. That’s one of the great advantages of this country. Our citizens can choose what they want to be. Rob, if you set your mind to being a doctor, you can be one. Anyone can be anything he wants.”

  “He?” Emma asked. “What about me?”

  The doctor smiled. “I’m sure you’ll make a wonderful wife and mother someday.”

  Emma frowned, but she bit back the words she would have liked to say.

  “Rob, would you like to follow me on my rounds today to see what it’s like to be a doctor?”

  Rob looked at Emma, his eyes shining. Emma tried to swallow her jealousy.

  “I’ll have to ask my mother,” Rob said. “We’re helping with the cleanup at the Davises’.”

  “That’s important. Why don’t we do it next week, then? I’ll talk to Anthony about it and let you know a good day.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Drake,” Rob said. “And thanks again for the magazines.”

  The doctor smiled and waved them on their way as he carried the magazines into the house. Rob leaped off the porch.

  “Emma, can you believe that? I’m going to go with the doctor on his calls. This will be a good experience for me, you know, to help me become a doctor.”

  “Humph,” she said. “I didn’t know you wanted to be a doctor.”

  “I didn’t either until a few days ago. It was just like it happened to Dr. Drake,” he said with awe in his voice. “After I read the articles in his magazines, I thought that I’d like to help people get well. I’d like to stop the cholera from killing people.”

  “He didn’t tell you if people died in minutes or not,” Emma said.

  Rob cocked his head. “No, he didn’t. I’ll ask him again when I go with him next week. Oh, I hope we’re not in school by then. But Father would let me go anyway, since Dr. Drake is going to talk to him. This is too important.”

  “Well, it’s not like you’re going to be a doctor after you go with Dr. Drake for one day,” Emma said. “You could have asked my grandfather about the cholera. He’s a doctor.”

  “I haven’t seen him since I learned about it,” Rob said. “But now I get to go with Dr. Drake. He’s a very important doctor.”

  “So is Grandpa Schroeder,” Emma said, feeling annoyed.

  Rob nodded, but she knew he was barely listening. With one street to go until they reached the Davises’, he yelled, “I’ll race you!” He darted off, but Emma kept walking. Sometimes Rob could be so aggravating.

  That afternoon they dipped more water out of the cellar. Rob had just changed jobs with Emma when she dipped a bucket, scooping a snake with the water. While the snake splashed around in the bucket, Rob ran in the house for a sack, and they poured the bucket of water, snake and all, into the sack. Water leaked right through, but the snake stayed in.

  They were getting near the bottom of the cellar, and it was mighty dark inside. Rob went for a lamp while Emma scooped up more water. Rotten apples and potatoes came with the last few scoops. She put her hands down to fill another bucket when something slithered over her fingers. She yelped and jumped back, startled. Rob was just coming out the back door with the lantern.

  “Get the broomstick!” Emma yelled. “There’s another snake down here.”

  She waited until he returned, and then she grabbed the broom and snake sack from his hands. Rob descended the steps with the lantern turned up high, and Emma followed.

  They thoroughly examined each cellar ledge and shelf. By the time they went upstairs again, they had captured three more snakes. Emma heard Rob suck in a long shaky sigh of relief as they climbed the cellar stairs, and she smiled to herself. Rob might be the one who would get to be a doctor when they grew up—but he was still scared of snakes.

  That night at dinner, discussion centered on Dr. Drake, who had spoken to Rob’s parents about allowing Rob to accompany him on his rounds. Emma concentrated on her food, trying not to mind that

  Rob was doing something she wanted to do.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to be a doctor,” Rob’s father said.

  “I do,” Rob said. “I want to help people get well.”

  “A doctor in the family … our son a doctor. What do you think of your brother, Sue Ellen?”

  “Dr. Etingoff,” Sue Ellen said with a broad grin, “would you pass the butter?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Following Dr. Drake

  The day Rob had been waiting for finally arrived. School wasn’t in session yet, so he didn’t have to worry about missing it. And Emma had a plan. She hitched a ride into town with her mother, who was taking eggs and milk to the market. Her mother dropped her off at the end of the Etingoffs’ street, and Emma marched up the sidewalk to Rob’s doorstep.

  “Don’t you need to help at the market?” Rob asked when he answered the door. She didn’t think he looked very happy to see her. “No. Mama said I could come over here.” “But I’m going over to Dr. Drake’s house.” “I know.” Emma pressed her lips together and looked at him. A long silence stretched between them, and Emma raised her eyebrows.

  She knew Rob was well aware of what she wanted, but he wasn’t going to say it. He didn’t want her along.

  “Good morning, Emma,” Aunt Patricia called as she walked into the parlor. “Come on in. You’re here bright and early.”

  Emma smiled. Rob had no choice now but to open the door and motion her inside.

  “Yes. I thought I’d be needed at the market today, but Mama said I could come on over here to spend some time with Rob.”

  “This is Rob’s day to go with Dr. Drake.”

  “She knows,” Rob said. “And I’d better get going.”

  Emma stood in front of the door and didn’t move.

  “Wait a minute,” his mother said. “Emma, did you want to go with him?”

  “Mother,” Rob said in protest.

  “I’d be honored to go.” Emma smiled again. “Thank you for asking.” She turned and headed back out the door, still smiling.

  “What if Dr. Drake says you can’t come?” Rob asked as he caught up with her.

  “Why would he do that?”

  Rob sighed. “Well, don’t say anything. Just listen to him,” he said as they approached Dr. Drake’s home.

  “I won’t get in the way,” Emma said. “You won’t even know I’m there.”

  “Why do you want to go on calls with him? You said you could ask your grandpa to take you.”

  “Maybe I want to see what’s so great about Dr. Drake.”

  “Humph.” Rob led the way around Dr. Drake’s house to the side entry of his office. He knocked and stood back as Dr. Drake opened the door.

  “Rob, I’ve been looking forward to your visit,” the doctor said. “Please come in.”

  Rob still looked angry, but Emma could tell he was struggling to hide his annoyance from the doctor. “Do you mind if my cousin Emma comes along, too?”

  Dr. Drake smiled. “Hello, Emma. You’re more than welcome to keep us company. Why don’t you two look around? I’ll be with you in a minute. I have a patient in my surgery.”

  He went into a separate room and shut the door behind him.

  “What an odd place,” Emma said. “It doesn’t look like Grandpa Schroeder’s office. What are all these rocks?”

  A glass-fronted display case held maybe fifty different rocks. One wall of the office was lined with bookcases, which held row after row of thick, leather-bound books. Emma walked over to the bookcase and examined them—medical books. So it was one of these that Dr. Drake had read when he was a little older than Rob and then decided to become a doctor.

  In one corner of the room sat a large desk, and behind it stood a skeleton. Emma stared at it and then moved over to to
uch its hand. “Do you think this is real?” she whispered.

  “Of course it’s real. That’s bone, isn’t it? It sure isn’t wood.”

  “I thought maybe it was animal bone carved in these shapes, but it’s not. This person was alive. This is creepy. Why wouldn’t they have buried him? Or her? This could be a woman.”

  “It is a woman,” Dr. Drake said from the doorway.

  Emma gasped, but Dr. Drake didn’t elaborate. He ushered his patient to the office door.

  “That core will keep growing. The skin on the outside is dead. Only thing to do is cut it off from time to time, or you’ll find yourself walking as if there were a stone in your boot. You can do it yourself with a sharp razor, but you must be careful not to go too deep.”

  The man thanked Dr. Drake and left.

  “You said it’s a woman,” Emma said, pointing at the skeleton. “Why is she here? Why didn’t she get a proper burial? Mama says a person deserves a Christian burial.”

  “She was a … a derelict, an intemperate person.”

  Emma didn’t understand, and from his wrinkled brow, she didn’t think Rob did either. For once he spoke up before she could. “What does that mean?”

  Dr. Drake hesitated briefly, then answered, “She drank a lot of alcohol. She didn’t have any relatives to claim her body when she died, so it was given to the medical school.”

  “That’s horrible,” Emma said. Rob scowled at her.

  “It’s not horrible, although I understand why you’d think so.” Dr. Drake didn’t seem in the least insulted by Emma’s frankness. “We can’t learn about the human body’s ills unless we know about the body. We need to see how the bones go together. We need to know how the organs function.”

  “But no proper burial?” Emma repeated.

  “The Bible says ashes to ashes,” Dr. Drake said. “Her body would decompose anyway. It was her spirit that mattered. She made a contribution to society in death by having her body be used for science.”

  He walked over to the skeleton and patted its shoulder bone. “I don’t know her real name, but I call her Kristen.”

  “Kristen! That’s my mother’s name,” Emma said.

  Dr. Drake looked taken aback. “Well then, I’ll have to change her name to Ruth.” He turned to Rob. “This,” he motioned toward the skeleton, “is part of observation in anatomy and physiology, and both studies are important in learning medicine. Next to God, a reliance on science and learning prepares you for the trials of life, and there are many in this profession. Do you think you are suited to be a doctor?”

  “Oh, yes,” Rob answered without hesitation. Emma knew he wasn’t about to admit that he found the skeleton as distasteful as she did.

  “Shall we go? I must call on Mrs. Heckel, who has a touch of the gout.”

  “What about these rocks?” Emma asked as she walked past the glass case.

  “I have some of them because of the minerals in them. Others contain fossils. The ones on the top shelf are from an Indian mound.”

  “You opened an Indian mound?” Emma asked. “Isn’t that like opening a grave?”

  Dr. Drake considered the question for some time. “I suppose it is, although I didn’t think of it that way when I excavated several mounds about fifteen years ago. Some of the mounds are thought to be a thousand years old, and I knew there could be a lot of history buried inside. Since farmers around here were plowing through the smaller ones, and even here in Cincinnati a street cut right through one, I felt the ones I excavated would have been destroyed anyway. The arrow points and beads over here,” he motioned toward another shelf, “are from a mound.”

  “We have one on our farm,” Emma said, “but we leave it alone.”

  Rob gave her another frown. “Do you have to sound so bossy?” he hissed in her ear.

  “We won’t need to go to the livery stable for my buggy,” Dr. Drake was saying, as unperturbed as ever. “Mrs. Heckel lives only a few blocks away.”

  Rob walked beside Dr. Drake, while Emma trailed behind. All the streets had not yet been cleared of the sludge from the flood, so it would have been hard to get a team and buggy through some sections of town.

  “This must be cleaned up,” Dr. Drake said, motioning to the flood debris. “When the cholera comes, it will be concentrated in filthy areas.”

  The cholera. Every time she heard that word, Emma’s heart pounded faster. From the articles she and Rob had read, it seemed to be an uncontrollable disease.

  “How is it spread?” Rob asked. “Why will it be in the filthy areas?”

  “I believe it’s spread by poisonous, invisible flying insects. These insects breed in filthy areas, much like mosquitoes breed in marshy areas.”

  “Then one person can’t give it to another person?” Rob asked. Emma was listening intently.

  “No. It’s not contagious. There’s agreement among doctors about that. But there’s disagreement on how it’s spread. Still, I believe I’m right about the tiny insects carrying it and giving it to one person after another. I think the atmosphere has something to do with it, too. Reports from London say it’s focused in the poorest areas where there is neglect and filth. And those most vulnerable to the disease are the intemperate, like Krist—.” He glanced at Emma. “Like Ruth, my skeleton.”

  “Here we are,” he said, stopping by a two-story house not unlike the Davis sisters’ home. “Mrs. Heckel doesn’t know you’re accompanying me today, so you’d better stay out here until I ask if she’ll permit observation.” He went inside, leaving them on the porch.

  In front of the house, great mounds of sludge dried in the spring sunshine. “They look like the Indian mounds,” Emma said, “except they aren’t as high. This place sure stinks.”

  “We haven’t got the flood mounds in the Davis sisters’ backyard dumped in the river,” Rob said. “We have to do that before the cholera comes.”

  “Do you believe that part about tiny flying insects we can’t see? That seems silly.” Emma plopped down in a clear spot on the porch step. “I don’t think we get to go in.”

  A moment later, Dr. Drake came back outside. A deep frown had settled on his forehead. Emma jumped up and stood beside Rob.

  “We’re going to see how Mr. Washington’s leg is doing,” Dr. Drake said.

  “What about Mrs. Heckel?” Emma asked.

  “A fake practitioner has sold her some liniment. Probably snake oil!” he snorted. “The poor and uneducated can easily be sold strange medical notions, but I thought Mrs. Heckel was above that.” He shook his head. “I constantly fight these quacks and imitators.”

  He set a brisk pace as he walked to his next patient’s house. Rob and Emma were almost running beside the doctor, who took one step to every two of theirs.

  “Stay here,” he said when they arrived at Mr. Washington’s home. “I’ll see if you’ll be allowed inside.”

  Emma sat on the step with Rob, but she popped up a moment later when Dr. Drake reappeared. “You may come in,” he said.

  There wasn’t much to see. Mr. Washington’s broken leg was covered with splints, and Dr. Drake was more concerned with the fever that came and went than with the leg. He prescribed a medicine that Emma had never heard of, and the trio left and walked back toward Dr. Drake’s home.

  “When will people stop dumping their garbage in the streets?” Dr. Drake asked as they sidestepped pigs that were rooting in the decaying matter. “We have dead animals decomposing here with rotting vegetables. Is it any wonder that the cholera will come?”

  He continued giving a lecture about filth and the creeks and animal carcasses that filled Emma with an uneasy sense of foreboding. She’d seen Mill Creek in the fall and early winter when it ran bloody red from the pork slaughterhouses, but she hadn’t thought about it as a problem, just as part of the seasonal cycle.

  They were only a block from Dr. Drake’s home when a young man charged toward them from the other direction.

  “Dr. Drake! Thank God I’ve found
you. We need you at the river. A man fell overboard.”

  “Is the Humane Society there?” Dr. Drake asked quickly. Emma had never seen the Humane Society in action, although she’d heard of their daring rescues.

  “Yes, they just pulled him out.”

  Dr. Drake broke into a run, and Rob and Emma raced after him. A few moments later, they reached the river. Several people surrounded a still form on the wharf. One man leaned over the drowning victim and pushed on his chest, then turned him on his side.

  “Make way. Dr. Drake’s here,” the young man said, panting in gasps.

  Dr. Drake knelt beside the unconscious man and took over the resuscitating procedure. Not even a minute later, the man coughed and vomited river water. Dr. Drake continued working on the man until he coughed again and caught his breath.

  “He’s breathing,” someone yelled, and a cheer went up from the crowd that had gathered.

  Emma wished she knew how to help people the way Dr. Drake did. She would have liked to save lives. If only she were a boy, then she could be like Dr. Drake.

  Fifteen minutes later, the young man was walking around as good as new.

  “I’m awfully thirsty,” he said, and the others laughed. Dr. Drake, Rob, and Emma once again started walking toward his house.

  “He’s a healthy specimen, and now that the Ohio is out of him, he seems fine,” Dr. Drake said. “After I stop by home to see if anyone is waiting or there are any messages, I need to go over to the hospital to see some patients, and you won’t be permitted to go in there.”

  At Dr. Drake’s house, they went inside while he collected some old issues of medical magazines for Rob to read.

  “When you return these, we’ll talk again,” Dr. Drake said.

  They were almost to the door when Emma turned back.

  “Dr. Drake, is it true that a person can catch the cholera and be dead in a few minutes?”