The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 97

LETTERS AND NOTES.

Forty-nine lambs were born to Cole ewes in the spring of 1860, and the entire family helped with the problem births and the castrating. "The flock's growin bigger every spring," Alden told Rob J. with worried pride. "You're goin to have to tell me what you want done with this bunch."

Rob J.'s choices were limited. They could butcher only a few. Little demand for bought meat existed among their neighbors, who raised animals of their own, and of course the meat would spoil before it could be carried to the city for sale. Live animals could be transported and sold, but that was complicated and required time, effort, and money. "Fleeces are very valuable in proportion to their bulk," Rob J. said. "The best plan is to keep building the flock and make our money from the sale of wool, the way my family's always done in Scotland."

"Yuh. Well, then, they's goin to be more work than ever. That's goin to require hirin another pair of hands," Alden said uneasily, and Shaman wondered if Alex had said anything to the hired man about wanting to run off. "Doug Penfield's willin to work for you part-time. Told me so."

"You think he's a good man?"

"Sure he is, comes from New Hampshire. That's not same's comin from Vermont, but it's close."

Rob J. agreed with him that it was, and Doug Penfield was hired.

That spring, Shaman made connection with Lucille Williams, daughter of Paul Williams, the farrier. For several years Lucille had attended the academy, where Shaman had taught her mathematics. Now Lucille was a young woman. If her blond hair, which she wore in a great knot, was more ashen than that of the yellow-maned Swedish girls of his dreams, she had a quick smile and a sweet face. Whenever he met her in the village he stopped to pa.s.s the time of day as an old friend, and to inquire about her work, which was split between her father's stables and Roberta's Women's Wear, her mother's Main Street shop. The arrangement allowed her flexibility and a certain freedom, for her parents always took her absence without question, each a.s.suming she had gone to attend some duty for the other. Therefore, when Lucille asked Shaman if he couldn't bring her some farm b.u.t.ter, to be delivered at her house at two in the afternoon next day, he was nervously excited.

She was careful to explain to him that he must tie his horse on Main Street in front of the stores, then walk around the block to Illinois Avenue, cut through the Reimers' property behind the row of tall lilac bushes and out of sight of the house, climb over the picket fence into the Williamses' backyard, and tap at her back door.

"So it won't look ... you know, misleading for the neighbors," she said, dropping her eyes. He wasn't surprised, because Alex had delivered b.u.t.ter to her fully a year earlier, with reports, but Shaman was apprehensive: he wasn't Alex.

Next day, the Reimers' lilacs were in full bloom. The fence was easy to scale, and the back door opened at once to his knock. Lucille was effusive in her appreciation of how nicely the b.u.t.ter was wrapped in towels, which she folded and left on the kitchen table with the dish when she brought the b.u.t.ter to the cold cellar. On her return she took his hand and led him into a room off the kitchen that obviously was Roberta Williams' fitting room. Half a bolt of gingham cloth leaned against one corner, and remnants of silk and satin and drill and cotton goods were folded neatly on a long shelf. Alongside a great horsehair sofa was a dressmaker's form of wire and cloth, and to Shaman's fascination, it had ivory b.u.t.tocks.

She offered her face for a single long kiss, and then each of them was undressing with dispatch and neatness, leaving their clothes in two fussy, well-matched little piles, their stockings in their shoes. He observed clinically that her body was out-of-balance; her shoulders were narrow and sloping, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like slightly raised pancakes, each centered with a small pool of syrup and adorned with a brownish berry, while her bottom half was heavier, with wide hips and thick legs. When she turned to throw a grayish sheet across the couch ("The horsehair scratches!"), he saw that the dressmaker's form was not for her skirts, which would be more ample.

She didn't let down her hair. "It takes so long to put it back up," she said apologetically, and he a.s.sured her almost formally it was quite all right.

In the doing, it was easy. She made it so, and he'd listened to the boasting stories of Alex and others for so long that, if he had never been down the trail himself, he had a good idea of the landmarks. The day before, he wouldn't have dreamed of touching the ivory b.u.t.tocks of the dressmaker's dummy, but now he dealt with warm, living flesh, and he licked the syrup and tasted the berries. Very quickly, and with great relief, he laid down the burden of chast.i.ty with a shuddering climax. Lacking the ability to hear what she panted in his ears, he utilized each of his other senses to the utmost, and she obliged by a.s.suming any and all positions for his close inspection, until he was able to repeat the earlier experience, taking somewhat longer. He was ready to keep on, on and on, but soon Lucille glanced at the clock and bounded off the couch, saying she had to have supper ready when her mother and father came home. As they dressed, they planned for the future. She (and this empty house!) were readily available during the day. Alas, that was when Shaman worked. They agreed she would try to be at home each Tuesday and Friday at two P.M., in case he could make it to town. That way, he explained practically, he could pick up the mail.

She was just as practical, revealing as she kissed him good-bye that she loved rock candy, the pink sugary kind, not the greenish variety that was flavored with mint. He a.s.sured her he understood the difference. On the other side of the fence, walking with an unfamiliar lightness, he went back down the long line of blossom-laden lilacs, through the heavy purple scent that for the rest of his life would be a highly erotic smell.

Lucille liked the smoothness of his hands, not knowing they were soft because much of the time they were covered with lanolin-rich yolk from the fleeces. The farm took wool well into May, Shaman, Alex, and Alden doing most of the shearing, with Doug Penfield eager to learn but clumsy with the clippers. Mostly they put Doug to work picking and scouring the fleeces. He brought them news of the outside world when he came, including the intelligence that the Republicans had chosen Abraham Lincoln as their presidential nominee. By the time all the fleeces were rolled up, tied, and packed in bales, they had also heard that the Democrats had met in Baltimore and had chosen Douglas after acrimonious debate. Within weeks, Southern Democrats had called a second Democratic convention in the same city, and nominated Vice-President John C. Breckinridge to run for president, calling for the protection of their right to own slaves.

Locally, the Democrats were more united, and had once again chosen John Kurland, the Rock Island attorney, to challenge Nick Holden for his congressional seat. Nick was running as the nominee of both the American party and the Republicans, and he was stumping hard for Lincoln, hoping to ride in on the presidential bandwagon. Lincoln had welcomed Know Nothing support, and it was why Rob J. declared that he couldn't vote for the man.

Shaman found it hard to concentrate on politics. In July he heard from the Cleveland Medical College, another refusal, and by summer's end he'd also been rejected by the Ohio College of Medicine and the University of Louisville. He told himself he needed only one acceptance. The first week in September, on a Tuesday when Lucille waited in vain, his father rode home with the mail and handed him a long brown envelope whose return address said it came from the Kentucky School of Medicine. He took it out to the barn before he ripped it open. He was glad to be alone, because it was another failed application, and he lay back in the hay and tried not to succ.u.mb to panic.

There was still time to go to Galesburg and enroll in Knox College as a third-year student. It would be safe, a return to a routine in which he'd survived, in which he'd done well. Once he had his baccalaureate degree, life could even be exciting, because he could go east to study science. Maybe even go to Europe.

If he didn't go back to Knox, and he couldn't enter medical school, what would his life be?

But he made no move to go to his father and ask to be returned to college. He lay in the hay a long time, and when he got up, he took a shovel and the barrow and began to muck out the barn, an act that in itself was a kind of answer.

Politics were impossible to avoid. In November Shaman's father freely admitted that when he went to the polls he'd voted for Douglas, but it was Lincoln's year, because the Northern and Southern Democrats split the party with their separate candidates, and Lincoln won easily. It was small consolation that Nick Holden finally had been turned out of office. "At least Kurland will make us a good congressman," Rob J. said. In the general store, folks wondered if Nick would come back to Holden's Crossing now, and resume the practice of law.

The question was put to rest within a few weeks, when Abraham Lincoln began to announce some of the upcoming appointments that would be made under the new administration. The Honorable Congressman Nicholas Holden, hero of the Sauk wars and ardent supporter of Mr. Lincoln's candidacy, had been named United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He was charged with the task of completing treaties with the Western tribes, and furnishing them with suitable reservations in return for peaceful conduct and forfeit of all other Indian lands and territories.

Rob J. was cranky and depressed for weeks.

It was a tense and unhappy time for Shaman personally, and a tense and unhappy time for the nation, but much later Shaman would look back at that winter with nostalgia, remembering it as a precious country scene carved by skilled and patient hands and then frozen in a crystal: the house, the barn. Icy river, snowy fields. The sheep and horses and milch cows. Each individual person. All of them safe and together in their proper place.

But the crystal had been knocked from the table and already was falling.

Within days of the election of a president who had run on the premise that they shouldn't own slaves, the Southern states began moving toward secession. South Carolina was hotly first, and United States Army forces that had occupied two forts in Charleston harbor moved into the larger of the two, Fort Sumter. At once they were under siege. In quick succession, state militias in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi seized United States installations from outnumbered peacetime federal forces, sometimes after fighting.

Dear Ma and Pa, I'm going off with Mal Howard to join up with the South. We don't know exactly what state we'll enlist in. Mal kind of would like to go to Tennessee, to serve with his kinfolk. It don't matter much to me, unless I can get to Virginia and say h.e.l.lo to our own kin.

Mr. Howard says it's important for the South to field a whopper army to show Lincoln they won't be trifled with. He says there's not to be a war, it's just a family quarrel. So I'll be back in plenty time for spring lambing.

Meantime, Pa, maybe I'll be given a horse and gun of my own!

Your loving son,

Alexander Bledsoe Cole

Shaman found another note in his room, scrawled on a torn piece of brown wrapping paper and weighted down on his pillow with the mate to the pocketknife his father had given him: Little Brother, Take care of this for me. I wouldn't want to lose it. See you directly.

Bigger Rob J. went at once to Julian Howard, who admitted in uneasy defiance that he'd driven the boys to Rock Island in his buckboard the previous evening, right after ch.o.r.es. "No need to get all riled, for goodness' sake! They're grown-up lads, and it's just a small adventure."

Rob J. asked him at what river wharf he had left them. Howard saw how Rob J. Cole stood close to him at his full bulky height, and felt the chill and contempt in the uppity doctor's voice, and he stammered out that he had left them off near the Three-Star Freight Transport pier.

Rob J. rode straight there, against the slim chance he could bring them home. If there had been the low temperatures of some other winters, perhaps he'd have had more luck, but the river wasn't icebound and traffic was heavy. The manager of the freight company looked at him in amazement when he asked if the man had noticed two youths looking to work on one of the flatboats or rafts heading downstream.

"Mister, we had seventy-two craft off-load or take on cargo at this pier yesterday, and that's in slow season, and we're just one Mississippi freight company of many. And most of those boats hire young men who walked away from a family somewheres, so I don't hardly take notice of any of em," he said, not unkindly.

Shaman thought the Southern states seceded like corn popping in a hot skillet. His red-eyed mother spent her time praying, and his father went on his home visits without smiling. In Rock Island one of the feed stores moved as much stock as possible into the back room and rented half its s.p.a.ce to an army recruiter. Shaman drifted into the place once himself, thinking that perhaps if all else failed in his life, he could be a stretcher-bearer, because he was big and strong. But the corporal who was signing up men raised his eyebrows comically as soon as he learned Shaman was deaf, and told him to go home.

He felt that with so much of the world going to h.e.l.l, he didn't have much right to be troubled about the confusion in his own life. The second Tuesday in January his father brought home a letter, and then another one that Friday. His father surprised him, because Rob J. knew he'd recommended nine schools, and he had kept track of the nine answering letters. "That's the last of them, isn't it?" he said to Shaman after supper that night.

"Yes. From Missouri Medical College. A rejection," Shaman said, and his father nodded without surprise.

"But this is the letter that came on Tuesday," Shaman said, and he took it from his pocket and unfolded it. It was from Dean Lester Nash Berwyn, M.D., of the Cincinnati Polyclinic Medical School. It accepted him as a student on the condition that he successfully complete the initial term of study as a trial period. The school, affiliated with the Southwestern Ohio Hospital of Cincinnati, offered a two-year program of study leading to the degree of Doctor of Medicine, four terms in each year. The next term was to begin on January 24.

Shaman should have felt the joy of victory, but he knew his father was seeing the words "on condition" and "trial period," and he prepared himself for an argument. With Alex gone, he was needed on the farm, but he was determined to escape, to grasp his chance. For many reasons, some of them selfish, he was angry that his father had allowed Alex to run away. While he was about it, he was angry at his father for being so d.a.m.ned certain there wasn't a G.o.d, and for not realizing that most people just weren't strong enough to be pacifists.

But when Rob J. looked up from the letter, Shaman saw his eyes and his mouth. The knowledge that Dr. Rob J. Cole wasn't invulnerable entered him like an arrow.

"Alex won't be hurt. He's going to be all right!" Shaman cried, but he knew it wasn't the honest a.s.sessment of a responsible person, of a man. Despite the existence of the room with the ivory-a.s.sed dummy, and the arrival of the letter from Cincinnati, he understood it was only the worthless promise of a desperate boy.

PART FIVE.

A FAMILY QUARREL.

January 24, 1861.

45.

AT THE POLYCLINIC.

Cincinnati sprawled larger than Shaman had expected, the streets teeming with traffic, the Ohio River ice-free and busy with boats. The intimidating smoke of factories rose from tall chimneys. Everywhere, there were people; he could imagine their noise.

A horse-car trolley took him from the riverside railroad depot straight to the promised land on Ninth Street. The Southwestern Ohio Hospital was composed of a pair of red-brick buildings, each three stories high, and a two-story wood-frame pesthouse. Across the street, in another brick building surmounted by a cupola with gla.s.s sides, was the Cincinnati Polyclinic Medical School.

Inside the school building Shaman saw shabby cla.s.srooms and lecture halls. He asked a student for the dean's office and was directed up an oak staircase to the second floor. Dr. Berwyn was a hearty middle-aged man with white mustaches and a hairless head that gleamed in the soft light of the high and grimy windows.

"Ah, so you are Cole."

He motioned Shaman into a seat. There followed a short talk on the history of the medical school, the responsibilities of good doctors, and the necessity of rigorous study habits. Shaman knew instinctively that the greeting was a set piece, recited for every new student, but this time there was a finish just for him. "You must not allow yourself to be intimidated by your conditional status," Dr. Berwyn said carefully. "In a sense, every student here is on trial and must prove himself a worthy candidate."

In a sense. Shaman would have wagered that not every student had been informed of his conditional status by letter. Still, he thanked the dean politely. Dr. Berwyn directed him to the dormitory, which proved to be a three-story wood-frame tenement building hiding behind the medical school. A dormitory roster tacked to the hallway wall informed him that Cole, Robert J., was billeted in room Two-B, along with Cooke, Paul P.; Torrington, Ruel; and Henried, William.

Two-B was a small room entirely filled by two double bunks, two bureaus, and a table with four chairs, one of which was occupied by a plump youth who stopped writing in a notebook when Shaman came in. "Halloo! I'm P.P. Cooke, from Xenia. Billy Henried's gone to get his books. So you must be either Torrington from Kentucky, or the deaf fellow."

Shaman laughed, suddenly very relaxed. "I'm the deaf fellow," he said. "Do you mind if I call you Paul?"

That evening they watched one another, drawing conclusions. Cooke was the son of a feed merchant, and prosperous, judging from his clothing and belongings. Shaman could see he was accustomed to playing the fool, perhaps because of his portliness, but there was shrewd intelligence in his brown eyes, which missed little. Billy Henried was slight and quiet. He told them he'd grown up on a farm outside of Columbus and had attended a seminary for two years before deciding he wasn't cut out for the priesthood. Ruel Torrington, who didn't arrive until after supper, was a surprise. He was twice as old as his roommates, and already a veteran medical pract.i.tioner. Apprenticed to a physician at a young age, he had decided to attend medical school to legitimize his t.i.tle of "Doctor."

The other three students in Two-B were cheered by his background, at first believing it would be an advantage to study alongside an experienced physician, but Torrington arrived in a bad mood that never changed as long as they knew him. The only bed that was unclaimed when he arrived was the top bunk against the wall, which he didn't fancy. He made it obvious that he scorned Cooke because he was fat, Shaman because he was deaf, and Henried because he was a Catholic. His animosity welded the other three into an early alliance, and they didn't waste much time on him.

Cooke had been there several days and had gathered intelligence which he shared with the others. The school had a faculty of generally high repute, but two of its stars shone more brightly than any others. One was the professor of surgery, Dr. Berwyn, who also served as dean. The other was Dr. Barnett A. McGowan, a pathologist who taught the dreaded course known as "A&P"-anatomy and physiology. "They call him Barney behind his back," Cooke confided. "They say he's responsible for failing more medical students than the rest of the faculty put together."

The next morning Shaman went to a savings bank and deposited most of the money he'd brought with him. He and his father had planned his financial needs carefully. Tuition was sixty dollars per year, fifty dollars if paid in advance. They had added money for room and meals, books, transportation, and other expenses. Rob J. had been happy to pay whatever was necessary, but Shaman stubbornly had held the idea that since his medical education was his own plan, he should pay for it. In the end they agreed that he would sign a note to his father, promising to repay every dollar following his graduation.

After leaving the bank, his next errand was to find the school's bursar and pay his tuition. It didn't help his spirits when that official explained that if Shaman should be dismissed for academic or health reasons, his tuition money could be only partially refunded.

The first cla.s.s he attended as a medical student was a one-hour lecture on the diseases of women. Shaman had learned in college that it was essential to reach every cla.s.s as early as possible, in order to sit close enough to lip-read with a high degree of accuracy. He showed up early enough to gain a place in the front row, which was fortunate, because Professor Harold Meigs lectured rapidly. Shaman had learned to take notes while watching the lecturer's mouth instead of the paper. He wrote carefully, aware Rob J. would ask to read his notes to learn what was happening in medical education.

His next cla.s.s, chemistry, revealed that he had sufficient laboratory background for medical school; this cheered him and stimulated his appet.i.te for food as well as for work. He went to the hospital dining room for a hasty lunch of crackers and meat soup, less than wonderful. Then he hurried to Cruikshank's Bookstore, which serviced the medical school, where he rented a microscope and bought his books from the required list: Dunglison's General Therapeutics and Materia Medica, McGowan's Human Physiology, Quain's Anatomical Plates, Berwyn's Operative Surgery, Fowne's Chemistry, and two books by Meigs, Woman, Her Diseases and Their Remedies and Diseases of Children.

As the elderly clerk was totting up his bill, Shaman glanced away to see Dr. Berwyn in conversation with a short glowering man whose neat beard was sprinkled with gray, like his mane of hair. He was as hirsute as Berwyn was bald. They were obviously deeply engaged in argument, although evidently they kept their voices low, because none of the people nearby paid them attention. Dr. Berwyn was half-turned from Shaman's sight, but the other man faced him squarely, and Shaman read his lips more by reflex than out of any desire to eavesdrop.

... know that this country is going to war. I am well aware, sir, that this incoming cla.s.s is forty-two students instead of the usual sixty, and I know well that some of these will run off to battle when the study of medicine gets too tough. Especially at such a time we must guard against lowering our standards. Harold Meigs says you have accepted some students whom last year you'd have rejected. I am told that among them there is even a deaf mute ...

Mercifully, at that point the clerk touched Shaman's arm and showed him the amount due.

"Who is the gentleman talking with Dr. Berwyn?" Shaman asked, the mute finding his voice.

"That is Dr. McGowan, sir," the clerk said, and Shaman nodded, gathered up his books, and fled.

Several hours later, Professor Barnett Alan McGowan sat at his desk in the dissection laboratory of the medical school and transcribed notes into permanent records. All the records dealt with death, since Dr. McGowan seldom had anything to do with a living patient. Because some people looked upon death as a less-than-happy environment, he'd grown accustomed to being a.s.signed working places that were out of the public's eye. In the hospital, where Dr. McGowan was chief pathologist, the dissection room was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the main building. Although it was convenient to the brick-lined tunnel that ran under the street between the hospital and the medical school, it was a drab place notable for the pipes that crisscrossed its low ceilings.

The medical-school anatomy laboratory was in the rear of its building, on the second floor. It was reached from both the corridor and a separate stairway of its own. One tall window, curtainless, let leaden winter light into the long narrow room. At one end of the splintery floor, facing the professor's desk, was a small amphitheater, its rising tiers of seats placed too close for comfort but not for concentration. At the other end stood a triple row of students' dissecting tables. In the center of the room was a large brine tank full of human parts and a table bearing rows of dissecting instruments. The body of a young woman, completely covered by a clean white sheet, lay on a board placed out of the way on sawhorses. It was the facts concerning this body that the professor was entering into the records.

At twenty minutes before the hour, a lone student came into the laboratory. Professor McGowan didn't look up or greet the large young man; he dipped his steel pen into the ink and continued to write as the student went directly to the middle seat in the front row and claimed it with his notebook. He didn't take the seat, but instead strolled through the laboratory on an inspection tour.

Stopping before the brine tank, to Dr. McGowan's amazement he picked up the wooden staff with the iron hook at the end of it, and began fishing among the body parts in the saline solution, like a small boy playing in a pond. In the nineteen years Dr. McGowan had taught first lessons in anatomy, no one ever had behaved in such a fashion. New students came to anatomy cla.s.s for the first time with portentous dignity. Usually they walked slowly, often with dread.

"Here, now! Stop that at once. Put the hook down," McGowan commanded.

The young man gave no sign he had heard, even when the professor clapped his hands sharply, and McGowan knew suddenly whom he was dealing with. He started to rise, but then sank back, curious to see where this might lead.

The young man moved the hook selectively among the items in the brine. Most of them were old, and many had been cut upon by other cla.s.ses of students. Their general condition of mutilation and decomposition was the key element in the shock of a first anatomy cla.s.s. McGowan saw the youth bring a wrist and hand to the surface, a tattered leg. Then he brought up a lower arm and hand that evidently was in better shape than most of the anatomical pieces. McGowan watched as he used the hook to bring the desired specimen into the top-right corner of the tank and then covered it with several disreputable objects. Hiding it!

At once the youth placed the hooked stick where he had found it and moved to the table, where he proceeded to inspect the scalpels for sharpness. When he found one he liked, he moved it slightly above the others on the table and returned to the amphitheater to take his seat.

Dr. McGowan chose to disregard him, and for the next ten minutes continued to work with the records. Eventually students began to drift into the laboratory. They took seats at once. Many were already pale, for there were odors in the room that gave flight to their fantasies and fears.

Precisely on the hour, Dr. McGowan put down his pen and moved in front of the desk. "Gentlemen," he said.

When they had fallen silent, he introduced himself. "In this course we study the dead in order that we may learn about, and help, the living. The first records of such studies were made by early Egyptians, who dissected the bodies of poor wretches they killed as human sacrifices. The ancient Greeks are the true fathers of physiological investigation. There was a great medical school in Alexandria, where Herophilus of Chalcedon studied the human organs and viscera. He named the calamus scriptorius and the duodenum."

Dr. McGowan was aware that the eyes of the young man in the center seat of the first row never left the professor's mouth. They literally hung on to his every word.

Gracefully he traced the disappearance of anatomical study into the superst.i.tious void of the Dark Ages, and its renaissance after A.D. 1300.

The final portion of his lecture concerned the fact that after the living spirit has left, researchers must treat the body without fear but with deference. "In my student days in Scotland, my professor likened the body after death to a house whose owner had moved. He said the corpus must be treated with careful dignity, out of respect for the soul who had lived there," Dr. McGowan said, and was annoyed to see that the youth in the front row was smiling.

He told them each to take a specimen from the brine tank and a knife, and to dissect their anatomical object and make a drawing of what they saw, to be turned in before they left the cla.s.s. Always at the first cla.s.s there was a moment's hesitation, a reluctance to begin. During this hanging-back, the youth who had arrived early was first again, for he'd risen at once and gone to the tank to collect the specimen he'd stashed, and then the sharp scalpel. While the others began to mill about the tank, he was already setting up shop at the dissection table with the most favorable light.

Dr. McGowan was acutely aware of the pressures of the first anatomy cla.s.s. He was accustomed to the sweetish stink that rose from the brine tank, but he knew of its effect on the uninitiated. He'd given some of the students an unfair task, because many of the specimens were in such poor condition it would be impossible to dissect them well and draw them accurately, and he took that into account. The exercise was a discipline, the first blooding of green troops. It was a challenge to their ability to face unpleasantness and adversity, and a harsh but necessary message that the practice of medicine consisted of more than collecting fees and enjoying a respected place in the community.

Within minutes several people had left the room, one of them a young man who departed in a great hurry. To Dr. McGowan's satisfaction, at length each of them returned. For almost an hour he strolled among the dissection tables, checking on their progress. The cla.s.s contained several mature men who had practiced medicine after apprenticeships. They were spared the nausea of some of the other students. Dr. McGowan knew from experience that some would be excellent doctors; but he watched one of them, a man named Ruel Torrington, slashing away at a shoulder, and he sighed, thinking of the terrible surgery this man must have left behind him.

He paused a fraction longer at the last table, where a fat youth with a sweating face struggled to work on a head that was mostly skull.