The Healing Season

by Ruth Axtell Morren

  He reread his colleague’s letter. Nothing had yet been published on the stethoscope. Laennec hadn’t even given any public lectures. But those who worked with him were amazed at the range of diagnostics available with the use of the baton. He described the differences being distinguished in the various diseases of the chest. The lungs of a consumptive had their own distinctive sounds, those of a pneumonic another.

  Ian placed the instrument carefully back in its wrappings. Tomorrow he would take it with him on his rounds after surgery.

  After he’d cleared off his desk, he headed to the other side of his study and lit the lamps in that area.

  Sitting down at his microscope, he began examining the different cultures he’d brought home with him from the dispensary.

  Gangrenous matter, ulcerous tissue, a rotted tooth, a slice of a tumor he had cut out and preserved in alcohol. He stared at the tiny orbs moving about under the lens, the different striations, the tiny world brought to visibility under the specially ground lens. He stared fascinated, carefully describing each sample in the notebook at his side.

  How did the tissues form abnormalities, the illness attack the healthy organs? These questions challenged the best physicians and surgeons of his day. He compared the healthy tissue to the diseased; he read every journal with the discoveries of his colleagues across the Channel. He thought back to the years he’d spent in France, visiting the large teaching hospitals, studying the effect of spacious wards and good ventilation.

  He compared the diseases of the poor in the City with those of the wealthy.

  He could only come to one conclusion. The filth and squalor of the living conditions of the poor contributed much to their illnesses and mortality rates.

  As the clock struck midnight, Ian finally rose and stretched, realizing how little he knew—how little any of them knew.

  When he’d put everything away, burning the putrid matter and washing his slides, he sat back down at his desk and drew forward his Bible.

  He opened it to where he’d left off the previous evening and continued reading. The stories of Jesus’ earthly ministry never failed to fascinate him. A pastor, physician, teacher, exhorter, prophet—all in one man. The part of Ian that yearned to preach to the masses the way his father had, rescuing souls from eternal damnation, met the physician in him who wished to cure every bodily illness that caused such human suffering and premature death in the world.

  “And the whole multitude sought to touch Him: for there went virtue out of Him, and He healed them all.”

  Ian gazed at his own hands. Would that virtue flowed out of them to heal all he ministered to. Where had that healing power gone to since the days Jesus walked the Earth?

  Despite the excitement of the new inventions, how paltry they seemed in light of the healing power of God. These instruments served to better illuminate disease, but they did nothing to hasten a remedy.

  What had happened to the church in the intervening centuries that had caused the disappearance of the miracles of Jesus’ ministry?

  Ian sighed as he closed his Bible. He had surgery tomorrow and must be up early. He needed to get some sleep.

  First, though, he bowed his head and clasped his hands atop the black cover of his Bible.

  Dear God, I thank You for Your hand on my life. Please continue guiding me in Your perfect will. His prayers turned to the more pressing cases he’d attended to that day and he prayed for each patient.

  Another face kept intruding.

  Dear Lord, I don’t know the state of Mrs. Neville’s soul. I don’t know why I keep thinking of her. Ian rested his head on his clasped hands. If it’s wrong, take the thought of her from me. Purify my thoughts of her. Let me see her as another soul that needs to know of Your goodness and mercy. Oh, God, make Yourself real to her. Bring her to repentance and salvation in Your dear Son, Jesus’, name.

  Though his prayer had ended, thoughts of Mrs. Neville persisted for quite some time before he eventually fell asleep.

  Eleanor and her daughter passed the fields at a brisk clip. The top of the carriage was pushed down to receive the afternoon sun. The two had just enjoyed an ice at a confectionary shop at the nearby village.

  Eleanor gazed at her ten-year-old daughter in admiration. Sarah looked fetching in the new bonnet and parasol Eleanor had brought her. They matched Eleanor’s exactly.

  Sarah had thought that stupendous. Now she twirled the parasol around, laughing in delight each time they passed a farmer in his field. She waved at all they rode by, human and animal alike.

  The leaves on the poplars shading the lane were just beginning to fade from green to yellow.

  “Oh, Aunt Eleanor, may we stop here for a moment,” she cried, pointing to a lovely willow-lined pond.

  “Of course we may.” Eleanor immediately bade the coachman to pull over.

  They descended the coach and waded through the tall grasses until reaching the pond. They found a dry bank to sit upon and watch the ducks swimming lazily across the dark water.

  “Tell me again about my mama and papa,” Sarah said in the soft tone she always used when speaking of her real parents.

  Eleanor looked down at the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl with the dimpled smile. How Eleanor loved that smile. She didn’t know whom Sarah took after, but she was eternally grateful she had nothing of her natural father’s looks—ugly, lecherous knave that he was.

  Eleanor put her arm around the girl, who never tired of hearing the tale. “Well, let’s see…your mother, she was the most beautiful lady I ever met—even prettier than the most fashionable lady of the ton. She had your hair and eyes. How they sparkled when she smiled, just like yours.” She squeezed Sarah’s shoulders.

  “More importantly, she was lovely inside, too, where it matters most.”

  “And you were her best friend?” asked Sarah the way she always did at that point.

  “Yes. Although she was about five years older than I, we became fast friends from the day we met. We told each other everything, just the way you and I do now. She was married when I first met her. She’d made the most brilliant match, a true love match. Why, it was more romantic even than Princess Charlotte’s to Prince Leopold.”

  She could feel Sarah shiver beneath her arm. “Ooh! How romantic! How did they meet?”

  “It’s funny, because in a way it was the same as the princess met the prince. Your father, too, came from a far-off land similar to Coburg. Transylvania, deep in the Carpathian Mountains.”

  “Transylvania,” breathed Sarah. The very syllables sounded romantic.

  “Count Otto von Ausberg from Transylvania was tall, dark and handsome. He had the bearing of a prince. Oh, did he look handsome in his gold-braided uniform, just like we saw Prince Leopold when he first came over to court Princess Charlotte!”

  They smiled at the memory of seeing him beside Princess Charlotte, waving at the crowds from a balcony at Carlton House, when he was the Prince Regent’s special guest.

  Eleanor sighed to heighten the drama of the tale. “Alas, your papa was a poor, impoverished nobleman like Prince Leopold when he first came to London.

  “Your mama’s parents, on the other hand, were ever so rich. They disapproved of a match between your parents. But your mama and papa were so very much in love. Finally, they were forced to run away together. They were poor, but so happy together.

  “I never saw a couple as happy as they—until they had you!” She turned to Sarah. “You can’t imagine any more joy, but there it was. When you arrived, they were even more full of joy.”

  Sarah’s smile disappeared. “But then came the sad part.”

  “Yes, my dear, then came the sad part. They both died from an awful outbreak of fever that year. Your mother first then, within a week, your father. I had taken you away at the first sign of illness. Your mother begged me to. She didn’t want you catching it, you were such a wee baby.”

  “Why didn’t you keep me as your own?”

  “Oh, my dear, how
I wish I could have, but I was just a girl myself. I had no husband. So I did the next best thing I could. I found a couple for you to stay with. Mama and Papa Thornton could offer you a nice home and family until someday you would be grown up enough to come and live with me. Since the day I brought you here, I’ve come and visited you every week.”

  “Yes. I do so love your visits.” Sarah played with the tassel at the end of her parasol. “What about Mama’s family?”

  “Her parents had died after your mama ran away. They had no other children, so there was no help from anyone on that side. You were all alone in the world.” She wondered if Sarah would still believe every detail of this story as she got older. Eleanor hoped that with the repetition, each fact would become so engrained in Sarah’s memory, it would be impossible to question the veracity of the tale.

  She patted her knees. “Well, we’d best continue back. Mama and Papa Thornton will wonder what’s keeping us. We don’t want to be late for tea.”

  Sarah scurried up and gave Eleanor a hand. The two dusted the grass off each other’s skirts, then headed back to the carriage.

  When they arrived at the prosperous farmhouse where Sarah lived, they were greeted by a married daughter of the Thorntons who had come by for a visit. Sarah ran off to show the woman’s two daughters her new parasol. Eleanor followed Mrs. Thornton and her daughter to the large kitchen in the back.

  Mrs. Thornton poured them each a cup of tea. “Eleanor, you mustn’t bring Sarah so many fancy gifts each time you come to visit her. Her wardrobe can scarcely contain the gowns she has.”

  “Oh, Louisa, I can’t help it. I see something pretty and I immediately think of Sarah.”

  “It’s not right,” Mrs. Thornton said with a shake of her head. “She needs to live at her station. Look at my daughter Lydia’s children. They’re not poor by any means. They’re well dressed, clean and proper behaved. You couldn’t ask for anything more. But they’re not rich and they don’t go acting as if they are.”

  Lydia nodded in agreement.

  Eleanor pursed her lips. This subject had come up more than once of late. She looked forward to the day she could take Sarah away for good to live with her. Soon.

  “Well, in another year or two, Sarah will be going away to Miss Hillary’s Academy for Young Ladies,” Eleanor replied in her most soothing tone. “There she will be on an equal footing with all the young ladies.”

  “Humph,” was all Mrs. Thornton said. But she didn’t remain silent long. After a sip of tea, she added, “What good will it do Sarah to study amongst all those lords’ and ladies’ daughters, when she don’t come from the same world? When they have their come-outs, where will Sarah be? Right back in this village but with notions way above her station. She won’t be able to follow her new friends from the young ladies’ academy. They certainly won’t welcome her into their circle when they know her humble parentage. No high-and-mighty lord will have her for his wife.”

  “There are plenty of respectable young gentlemen she can marry,” countered Eleanor, who had given her daughter’s future lots of thought over the years. “She could marry a solicitor or a—a—doctor—” A fleeting image of the one she had recently met invaded her thoughts. “There are many men who are not of the ton, but who are gentlemen nonetheless.”

  “But will she have them if her head has been filled up with such notions of society, starting with all these tales of her own ma and dad? I’ve been saying it for years, dear Eleanor, you haven’t done her any good telling her those Banbury tales.”

  Eleanor gave a careless laugh. “Louisa, you worry too much. I have it all figured out. Sarah will go to Miss Hillary’s school and she’ll move to London with me. By then I shall have a nice place in Mayfair. When it’s time for her come-out, I shall put out discreet inquiries and I’m sure we’ll meet several eligible young bachelors.”

  “Who’ll be wanting to know the amount of her dowry.”

  Eleanor sat up straighter in the ladder-back chair. “I have been putting money away for her since she was an infant. She’ll have her dowry.”

  Once again Mrs. Thornton harrumphed, but said no more.

  Chapter Six

  Ian walked into the operating theater at St. Thomas’s promptly at ten o’clock the next morning. The semicircular, amphitheater-style viewing area known as the “standings” was already crammed. Students, fellow surgeons, interns, some physicians and apothecaries stood leaning against the wooden railings on each of the five tiers rising from the operating floor.

  The front row was reserved for the dressers of the other surgeons. His own, as well as his apprentices, already stood around the operating table, a plain, stout deal table half-covered in a sheet of oilcloth.

  He glanced at its end. Good, no outside visitors today. Usually these special guests of his colleagues sat in chairs at one end of the operating table, but today they stood empty.

  The hum of voices diminished only somewhat as he walked to the wooden pegs by the entrance. He removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves. Then he donned the coat hanging by the door. It was stiff with dried blood. He turned up its collar to protect his neck cloth. Over the coat he tied on a grocer’s bib and apron, then proceeded to wash his hands in the basin. Most surgeons laughed at this last step, but Ian’s fastidious nature demanded this measure both before and after surgery.

  Ian walked to the table for his inspection. Sunlight streamed in from the skylight above, giving good natural light for the operation.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he greeted his assistants.

  “Good morning, Mr. Russell,” they replied, standing at attention.

  The wooden box beneath the table had been filled with fresh sawdust. The tables beside the operating table were covered with green baize cloth and the instruments neatly laid out. Ligatures of various sizes; tourniquet and tape; knives and saws; tenacula, scissors, needles, and pins; rolls of lint and bandages.

  On another table were basins of water, pledgets and sponges.

  “Very good,” he told his assistants. For months after he’d arrived, he’d had to fight for adequate instruments and hygiene. After observing the conditions of La Charité, and the high standards of cleanliness maintained by the sisters who looked after the patients in the wards, he’d striven to institute such standards here, but it had been a steady uphill battle.

  The patient was brought in and told to sit on the wooden table. Ian shook his left hand, the other lying in his lap inert.

  “Good morning, Mr. Halliday. Are you ready?” At least the man looked strong and healthy. There was a good chance he would survive.

  “Guess I’m ready as I’ll ever be. Make it quick, Doc.”

  “It’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  As Ian moved to his instrument tray, his assistant gave the patient the “physician’s stick” to bite on.

  As soon as his assistants were ready, one supporting the man’s back and tying his good arm behind him, the other holding his thighs, Ian said a short, silent prayer and turned to his instrument table.

  Another assistant drew up the skin of the man’s upper arm tightly and tied a tourniquet around it. A dresser bound a tape below this. Taking up a knife, Ian made a quick, clean incision, ignoring the patient’s sudden cry and involuntary jerk backward. The assistants held him firm. Ian took up one of the heavy, square-edged saws and bore down hard, sawing through the bone and sinew. Blood spurted out, spattering his apron, falling into the sawdust.

  Ian took the needle and catgut held out to him by the dresser and secured the artery and some of the other vessels together.

  His assistant loosened the tourniquet and the dresser cleaned the stump with one of the sponges. Ian drew the flaps of skin down over the stump and covered them with the lint. The dresser wrapped a damp pledget over this and then bound the stump with bandages.

  It was over quickly, as Ian had promised the man. As those in the amphitheater shouted and applauded, two of Ian’s assistants carried the patient
out of the theater and into an awaiting bed, where they would give him a draft to quiet him and take turns keeping the arm raised to prevent the ligatures being pulled off with the pressure.

  Ian turned to wash his hands and oversee the washing of his instruments. The next operation involved a lithotomy, or removing a bladder stone.

  The patient was a man in his seventies. He’d been given quite a quantity of barley water to drink to inflate his bladder. He was trembling with fear and Ian did the best to assure him the entire procedure would take under half a minute.

  Ian finished his rounds at St. Thomas’s. Thursdays were grueling, beginning with surgery in the operating theater, followed by checking on patients in the eight different wards.

  He removed his soiled jacket and put on a clean one he kept on a hook in one of the lecture halls. Tomorrow would be his weekly anatomy lecture, followed by dissecting and pathology as they cut open and analyzed the cadavers of those patients who had died the night before.

  There had been much resistance to dissecting the bodies of deceased patients, but now they were gradually following the French model begun under the great Corvisart. Hypotheses based on unfounded theories of the four different humors of the bodies were no longer acceptable, but only those findings based upon detailed observation and repeated experimentation.

  Whatever else the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire had wrought, one positive development had been the reorganization and formation of the medical schools and teaching hospitals in France. The two years Ian had spent in the city after the allies had entered Paris until the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo had been among the most illuminating of his career. He’d seen the success rate in the large, airy wards of La Charité, where he’d followed the French physicians with their coterie of students going from the patients’ wards to the dissecting rooms. They rigorously compared the symptoms of the sick with the condition of their organs after death.