Dr. Kildare Goes Home E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

After graduating from medical school, Dr. James Kildar returns to his small hometown where his proud parents Stephen and Martha Kildar and childhood friend Alice Raymond expect him to join his father in his medical practice. However, he is more ambitious, although he is not sure what he wants to do. He recruited as an intern at New York Hospital.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 1.–YOU CAN BE DOCTORS

WHEN the head of the hospital, that hard-faced Roman, Doctor Carew, joined himself to their famous diagnostician, Leonard Gillespie, the rest of the staff prepared itself for something important.

As the cortege moved down the hall, the way was led by the wheel-chair of that white-haired old lion, Gillespie, who always looked as if he had just finished one battle and was hurrying to get into another fight.

Carew walked at one side of him and on the other was Doctor Stephen Kildare, whose age and country practice seemed to appear in the cut of his threadbare clothes.

Behind the chair was young Doctor Kildare, carrying a sheaf of charts. Nurse Mary Lamont now hurried ahead to open the door to an infants’ ward.

“Wait a minute,” said Gillespie. “Kildare!”

“Yes, sir,” said young Kildare.

“Back up,” said Gillespie. “I don’t mean you, babyface. I mean somebody of importance. Doctor Kildare,” he went on to the father, “before we go in there to look your experiment in the face, I’m going to tell you that if it runs on as well as it’s started, I intend to publish your results.”

“Publish? Publish?” murmured old Kildare. “No, Gillespie. It’s kind of you but I wouldn’t know what to do with a public appearance. I mean to say–”

“You and your modesty are out of this,” said Gillespie. “In a small way it would make you famous, perhaps; but the main lesson is that country practitioners could benefit the whole world, as well as their patients, now and then, if they’d do what you’ve done: take notes on their work and their results.

“The work of all our doctors every day, with ten minutes to note it down, would be like the rain in the mountains that works its way to the sea, sooner or later–rivers of sound information, Kildare, to sweep filthy disease away and give us a clean world.

“But confound them they won’t take time to make notes...Give me one of your books, Kildare!”

The old country doctor pulled out a small notebook and handed it over. Gillespie thumbed through a few of the crowded pages.

“Heaven help the man who had to read it,” he said, “but just the same this is the sword that will win our battle for us. What started the good habit for you?”

“A bad, tricky memory,” confessed the old man, and laughed a little, ashamed of himself, as they went on into the ward so filled with sun and whiteness, that it glowed like a crystal.

“Here we are with the seedlings,” said Gillespie, looking over the row of bassinets. “How quickly they grow up into trees, Kildare, and blights hit them in the leaf and the branch, until at last they decay at the root and go back to the earth that made ’em.”

“After bearing a little fruit, now and then?” suggested old Kildare.

“That’s where Jimmy gets it, eh?” demanded Gillespie. “That crackpot optimism of his that’s always seeing saints and heroes wrapped up in human hides...What’s the matter with you now, young Doctor Kildare? What are you scowling about? Have I stepped on one of your sore toes? Can’t you take it?”

“It’s that that bothers me,” said Kildare, pointing, and with his head canted a little to the side.

“What’s he talking about?” asked Gillespie.

“It’s the baby crying in the isolation ward next door,” said Nurse Lamont.

It was rather a rhythm to be felt than a sound to be heard.

“I get it now,” said Gillespie. “First time you’ve ever heard a baby crying, young Kildare?”

“I don’t like it,” said Kildare.

“Well, if he doesn’t like it, why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” demanded Gillespie. “What’s the case, Jimmy?”

“Undernourishment, to begin with,” said Kildare. “But there’s an acutely infected throat, also, and the lab report is negative for a streptococcic infection.”

“Look at that girl, doctor,” said Gillespie to old Kildare, as he pointed out Mary Lamont. “Every time your son speaks, she looks as if a bird were singing. Might be a swan-song, one of these days. Wipe off that silly look, Lamont, and go check the sore throat in that ward.”

As she hurried off, he added: “Getting so, around this hospital, that we don’t even dare let the babies cry. Your boy mightn’t like it.”

Carew said: “We’ll take one of the outstanding cases. Kildare, suggest one.”

Young Kildare said to the ward nurse: “Let’s have a look at Pete Douglas.”

“Yes, doctor,” she said, turning.

“Do you know all the names of the babies in this ward?” Carew asked the interne.

“I believe so, sir,” said Kildare.

The eye of the father brightened, but old Gillespie was snarling: “Yes, he spreads himself all over the hospital. Spreads himself thin. Has to know everything. Nose into everything. Patients can’t have any privacy around this man’s hospital. I wish you’d find me a new assistant, Walter.”

“If I find one, you’ll get rid of him in a day,” said Carew, faintly smiling. He added to old Kildare, “How did you run into this cereal you’ve been using for baby formulae?”

“I ran into it in my kitchen,” said the country doctor, with his mind and his eye still half on his son. “My wife cooked it; her mother had cooked it before her. Jimmy, here, was a scrawny baby; so I tried that cereal and it worked. I’ve kept on using it. It’s not infallible but sometimes it turns the trick; and I’ve been keeping up with the vitamins of late years. They seemed to help.”

“Listen to these brats crowing,” said Gillespie. “Not like a ward of sick children at all. More like bull-frogs singing on a summer evening. What kind of bull-frogs d’you have out there in Dartford, doctor?”

“All matched voices,” said old Kildare. “You should hear ’em! Nothing but close harmony.”

“I’d like to hear ‘em,” said Gillespie, “if you’ll ever give me a chance and ask me out there...Give me that baby, nurse!”

The nurse had returned with a small infant in her arms; she laid it in the lap of the diagnostician. It was a scrawny little specimen with a mist of red hair. It clenched its fists, now, and writhed its mouth wide open, ready to yell.

“Shut your mouth and lie still, Pete,” said Gillespie.

“Look!” murmured the nurse, amazed, for Pete Douglas changed his mind about wailing and began to gape, open-mouthed, at the ugly old face of Gillespie.

“What’s there to look at?” demanded Gillespie. “It’d be a pretty strange thing if I couldn’t keep a Scotch baby from crying, wouldn’t it? Tell me about this weighty Douglas, Jimmy.”

“He’s six months old,” said young Kildare. “He came in here ten days ago badly dehydrated and we couldn’t make him hold liquids. I tried father’s formula. He’s put on three pounds already.”

“Good!” said Carew.

“Good? Not at all!” said Gillespie. “It’s only barely medium, considering that he’s a Scotch baby...Kildare,” he added, turning to the country doctor, “I am going to publish you and your grandma’s cereal, whether you like it or not.”

“Why–” began old Kildare, embarrassed and pleased.

“No, sir,” cut in the son. “Not yet. We’ve still got to learn a lot about it.”

“You see?” said Gillespie, pointing. “He thinks that there’s only one doctor in his family. Well, he’s right, and the one doctor isn’t he. What’s the matter? Why can’t we publish results like this, young man?”

“We’ve had some failures,” said Jimmy. “And Father hasn’t cleaned up the record of the last three years. It’s still in his notebooks.”

“Will you give us that stuff, then?” asked Gillespie. “I’ll have it all in the mail inside of a week,” he answered.

Mary Lamont came rather breathlessly back into the ward. There followed her a tall, gloomy young man who wore a striped apron.

“What’s this? Some kitchen help?” asked Gillespie. “It’s a new report on that throat case in the isolation ward,” said the nurse.

“Who are you?” demanded Gillespie.

“Davison, sir,” said the tall young man. “I’m the media man, in the laboratory, sir.”

“I thought you looked something like a cook,” said Gillespie. “Did Doctor Kearns give you the report for us? Let me have some details.”

“The first swab didn’t give altogether satisfactory results. It was a throat swab, sir. There were some organisms that seemed to resemble diphtheria bacilli.”

“Is that what Kearns said?”

“Dr. Kearns was busy at the moment.”

“So you took over and went ahead?”

“Yes, sir. I looked up the patient and got a nose swab. The results are perfectly clear. I spread the swab on Loffler’s media and incubated it. The diphtheria bacillus was there.”

“Diphtheria. I remember when that was a word to curdle the spinal marrow of a doctor,” said Gillespie. “But I want to know something else, Davison.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why the devil did Doctor Kearns turn over delicate and important work like this to you?”

“I specialised somewhat in this work, sir.”

“Yes, yes. As a laboratory worker, very good, very good. Commendable industry and all that. But why in thunder does Kearns let this work be done by anyone other than a full-fledged doctor?”

“I am a doctor, sir,” said Davison.

“A doctor? In a fifteen dollar a week laboratory job?” growled Gillespie.

“No, it’s eighteen dollars, sir.”

Gillespie closed his eyes.

“What is your school, doctor?” he asked. “Columbia, sir.”

“Trouble with your studies?”

“Not particularly.”

“Where did you stand in your class?”

“Number three, sir.”

“Afterwards you hung out your shingle and no patients came?”

“That was it, sir.”

“I’m going to remember you, Davison,” said Gillespie. “Though I don’t know what good my thinking will do. How many millions of Americans practically do without medical service, and how many ten thousands of young doctors fold up because they can’t get started?”

“Look, Carew! Here’s the desert; and here’s water. Bring the two together and you have life. But what can be done when–”

His voice stopped short; his hand paused in the middle of a gesture; for Pete Douglas had caught at Gillespie’s forefinger and was holding it now in a strong and delighted grip.

There was a good deal of laughter over this. Under cover of it Kildare stepped up to Davison, who had drawn gradually back from the group as if he could not tell whether it were time to linger or leave.

Kildare said: “What’s the matter, Jack? You look white. You look sick. Anything wrong with Joan?”

“She’s pretty well,” murmured Davison. “It was only the way Gillespie glowered at me. I thought for a minute that my job was going out the window.”

“It won’t go out of the window,” said Kildare, staring at him and seeing things that did not meet the eye. “Another three weeks before the baby arrives?”

The gloomy face of Davison lighted. “That’s right,” he said. “You’re the one that remembers things, Jimmy!”

Then Gillespie was making an uproar about something, with another infant in his arms that laughed through the storm. Kildare went back to him slowly.

This fellow Davison was getting something almost like hope and happiness out of eighteen dollars a week; twenty odd years of education repaid with eighteen dollars a week–two people crowded into a single room and a third life now to be crammed into the same quarters–and all of this happening to a man of real talent, a man of genius, perhaps.

It entered Kildare like a shadow; it made his heart as cold as a stone. The chill of it never would leave him so long as he had to remember the frightened face of Davison, the wan smiling of Joan.

There was a call for Dr. Carew. He was wanted at once in his office.

“You people have the luck,” he said. “You can be doctors. I’m only an office boy...Kildare, I want to talk some more about this. Come along with me and bring those charts...”

“Get the rest of the reports and bring them on to Carew’s office,” said Kildare to Mary Lamont. “He’s going to be full of questions.”

CHAPTER 2.–ORANGE JUICE FOR TWO

CAREW, hurrying with his quick, short steps, was first through the ante-room of his office, so bent on getting to his telephone that he had no eye for the people who were waiting.

But Kildare took note of a boy of eighteen or nineteen and a girl not much younger who rose up quickly from their chairs and with a frightened expectancy watched Carew cross the room.

Carew’s secretary said: “Your son is here, doctor.”

“Let him wait,” snapped Carew, throwing open the door of his inner office.

The girl and boy sat down again, slowly, glancing at one another with pain and with relief mingled, as if some necessary operation had been postponed. Their hands touched and that covert gesture conveyed a long message to Kildare.

He carried her picture with him into the office where Carew already was snatching up a telephone. She was rather a pretty girl with high-arched, old-fashioned eyebrows, and there was nothing of 1941 about her. She seemed to have been created in an earlier age of stillness and of more quiet thought.

Sometimes a human life is written with an indelible ink that strikes almost through the page; but others, however charming, are in fragile characters, easily erased. She was like that, Kildare thought: easily erased, too dimly printed in the world’s fabric.

In the meantime he laid out the charts on the desk.

The secretary appeared at the door as Carew rang off from a telephone conversation.

“Your son wishes to know whether he should wait or come back another day?” she asked.

“Tell him another day,” answered Carew. “No, let him come in now... Families have no sense, Kildare. They think a father is an institution, not a human being...Now let’s have a look at the chart of this baby, this what’s-his-name.”

“Pete Douglas? The chart is here.”

The door opened.

“Come in, Willie,” said Carew..."Why should you bother trying to remember the names of the infants, Kildare?”

“I don’t bother. But somehow names mean more to me than numbers. Besides, this Pete is a pretty tough fellow.”

“Was he very ill, Kildare?”

“Very ill, sir.”

“What formula was he on before you shifted him to your father’s?...Willie, what do you want?”