Life Unveiled, by a Child of the Drumlins — Chapter 8 Part III - The Medic

We had private quizz-classes among ourselves: Four of us girls met for study in the evening--I say girls, the two others were no longer girls; one was probably twenty-five, the other perhaps near thirty.

The younger of these, Miss Thorndike, was also from the Empire State, a bright, capable person, used to city life, a striking, winning personality, and one who had herself well in hand.

She had some masculine ways which she tried rigorously to overcome.

She seemed to know the ropes of college life pretty well; she was sophisticated, and we were not and, realizing our inexperience, she exercised a chaperonage over us so tactful that we were not aware of it till years after.

Miss Wilkins was a typical strenuous New England woman, prim and sensitive, who constituted herself our avowed chaperone, directing, scolding, and mothering us; making peace between us, and dictating to us when we much preferred to paddle our own canoes.

Though fond of her, we often teased her, sometimes deliberately doing things to shock her (how easily she blushed!

); yet we always ended penitently with, “but Miss Wilkins is such a good woman!

” And she was, and withal very human and tolerant of our uncurbed, undisciplined ways.

I realize now how much we owe to hers and Miss Thorndike’s kind and wise supervision.

We rented bones to study the first year.

I recall the amused feeling I had the night I carried home my box of bones: Crossing the park, as I met passers-by, I thought, “Wouldn’t they open their eyes if they knew what is in this box!

” Here, as always, the incongruity, the hidden reality, appealed to me.

One day at the Y. W.

C. A.

, when it was too cold to study in my room, taking Gray’s Anatomy and my rented femur, I went out and sat by the radiator at our end of the hall; there was but little passing to and fro and I was soon absorbed in reading Gray and tracing the various facets and foramina on the huge thigh-bone.

“Young woman, is that a human bone?

” a voice called to me severely from the other end of the long hall.

“Yes, would you like to see it?

” I answered--how innocently, I cannot say.

I am under the impression that even at the start I recognized her horror, and did it mischievously, but with an air of innocence as I held it toward her.

“You horrid thing!

” she gasped and disappeared in her room.

This disconcerted me: She was the head-laundress of the institution, and she and the Superintendent were great friends.

I well knew she was angry, but I was a bit angry, too.

I didn’t like being called names, and had high ideas of the respectability of my pursuit; I knew it was neither horrid nor disgraceful to study anatomy, whatever she in her prim, prudish way might think.

Getting more and more angry, I could study no longer.

That night, dear, sensitive Miss Wilkins came to me in perturbation: I had offended Miss Tyler; she might complain of me to the Superintendent.

I got on my highest heels of dignity: Miss Tyler had offended me; I was sitting in my end of the hall attending to my own affairs when she accosted me; and when I politely answered her, even offering to show her what I was interested in, and about which she seemed so curious, she had insulted me, rudely called me names, and slammed her door, and the episode had spoiled my afternoon’s study; and did not Miss Wilkins herself think that the cause for complaint was on my side?

Then it was that Miss Wilkins laboured with me.

At first I was obdurate, and even in the end did not quite agree with her; but so persuasive was she, that I promised not to study my bones in the hall again, and not to offend Miss Tyler, or any one else, by what was to them unquestionably an offensive sight.

She reminded me that we must not expect everyone to look upon these things from the scientific standpoint; that we must respect the prejudices of others; that we surely did not want to make ourselves conspicuous or obnoxious, and bring reproach upon women medical students.

She struck the right note there, knowing how I recoiled from Dr. Matson’s mannish ways, and that I had said I would rather not be a doctor at all, if I had to get coarse and masculine.

As she showed how timid and conservative Miss Tyler was, she made me feel it my duty to refrain from further wounding her sensibilities.

How we observed, and insensibly estimated, our various instructors!

Our professor in physiology was a diffident, scholarly man, stiff as a poker; dry and ponderous as a lecturer.

We liked the chemistry professor, and liked the laboratory work, yet chemistry was for me the hardest first-year study.

Nowadays when I see certain chemicals that we used in experiments, I get a sudden vision of my desk in the laboratory, with the test-tubes, the gas-burners, the retorts, the filter-papers, and all; and can even see the faces of the various students as they stand at their desks heating solutions; holding others up to the light--now one bends to record something on a chart, now there’s a crash of broken glass, a rustle and a stir, perhaps a giggle, as some unlucky student blunders in an experiment.

How it all comes back at the sight of a bottle marked Cupric Sulphate, or H_{2} SO_{4}!

What a witty lecturer we had in the History and Methodology of Medicine--a short, fidgety man with big blue eyes and benevolent face.

He had a funny way of pulling at his collars and cuffs while lecturing, as if they choked him and he wished he could take them off.

When early in the first year our courses in dissections began, I was all eagerness--the untried always having its charm for me.

My name being at the beginning of the alphabet, it fell to me to be one of the first six students to work on the first subject.

I had bought my dissecting-case from one of the “middlers”; my long-sleeved apron was ready; and I awaited impatiently the day, little dreaming what I was so eager about.

Assembled in the dissecting room that first day to see us begin were many middlers and seniors, as well as the sixty or more in our own class.

Each “subject,” as the cadavers are called, is apportioned in six “parts,” lots being cast for the “parts,” six students working simultaneously on a body.

Half the abdomen and the right lower extremity fell to me.

My partner on the other side was a young woman, older than I, but very shy and reserved.

Other students drew the head and neck, the chest and upper extremities.

That first day as we entered the dissecting room there lay the body, a man’s body, stiff and stark, on the slanting zinc-covered table.

The arteries had been injected with red wax, and much of this loose wax and other extraneous matter was clinging to the skin of our subject.

It was horrible to see the naked body.

I had not thought of that.

I don’t know what I had thought of, surely not that--and this room full of onlooking students!

The Demonstrator in anatomy gave us a serious talk, inciting us to earnestness, cautioning us against carelessness, levity, or other unseemly behaviour, after which he told us to set to work.

The first thing, he said, was to sponge the part assigned to us, then make our incisions, as we had been previously instructed, and proceed with the dissections.

I shall never forget the repugnance as well as the embarrassment I felt at beginning our task.

The young men in our class, as new as were we to it all, were awed as well as we, but those horrid middlers and seniors looking on with amusement!

I felt my face getting redder and redder, and Miss Bigelow’s cheeks looked as though they would burst;

but with downcast eyes we kept at work, probably taking far more pains than we needed to.

I can see just how gingerly we held the sponges; the wax stuck; we thought we had to get off every speck.

Then Miss Bigelow, without looking up, whispered, “What shall we do with the pail?

” “Empty it, I suppose,” I snapped out; and getting up courage enough to glance round the room, spied a sink.

Stooping, I picked up the loathsome pail and, with blazing cheeks, started across the room, feeling that a great indignity was being undergone--to have to do this at all was bad enough (I still think it was janitor’s work), but it was intolerable to do it before those idle middlers.

Before I had taken many steps a young man in our class came up, took the pail from me, and in a soothing tone said, “Please let me--now the worst is over, Miss Arnold.

” The tears started at his kindness.

The other young men must have felt ashamed, for they soon rallied round the table, showing us how to make the first incisions, how to hold our scalpels and tissue forceps, in fact, giving us many useful hints.

We had had the theory, but to make the actual incisions, to lift the skin and deftly dissect it from the tissues beneath--was different from what we had imagined.

Going from student to student, the Demonstrator instructed and encouraged each in turn.

Soon the room, thinned of its spectators, took on a different aspect: the novices bent over their work with interest and absorption.

The painful emotion I had felt at seeing those bodies, stripped and at the mercy of our little knives and forceps, soon gave place to genuine enthusiasm.

I dreaded the feel of the cold skin, but once that was removed, I was all interest; one then lost sight of the human side, and saw only the beautiful mechanism.

How wonderful it seemed when I had the external abdominal muscle laid bare, and its structure disclosed, and this and the other muscles and their adaptations seen!

Some days later when one of the girls, working on an arm, had the deltoid exposed, I was surprised to hear one of the assistant demonstrators (a woman) say to her, “It is a pretty muscle, isn’t it?

” “Pretty” seemed such an incongruous word to use, but I soon learned to admire the well-dissected muscles, though rather than “pretty” I should have called them “beautiful.

” The instructors demonstrated the viscera, which, with the muscles and other “soft parts” were removed piecemeal, and disposed of daily.

Whitman’s tremendously realistic line, “What is removed drops horribly into the pail,” always takes me back to the dissecting room with its repulsive odours and its sorry sights.

But our growing interest did much to mitigate the repellent features.

The actual dissection was interesting and easy for me, but it was not easy to demonstrate the muscles and groups of muscles, for it was always difficult to comprehend their action.

Never having been able to understand levers and pulleys and mechanical things, I could not reason out things which were so obvious to others.

It was absurd, after getting the muscles nicely dissected, with their points of origin and insertion before my very eyes, to be unable to deduce what their actions were.

I had no “gumption.

” This inability on my part puzzled the Demonstrator and his assistants--the senior students, who moved about from table to table, listening to our recitations whenever we would get a group of muscles exposed for demonstration.

One dignified senior who was usually on hand to hear me recite, was painstaking in trying to make me understand their action: “Why, can’t you see?

” he would ask; then, convinced that I could not, would try to drill it into my head.

His dignified air awed me considerably, and I was demure and respectful to him, always calling him “Doctor” as, in the freshness of our first-year’s awe of them, we supposed we had to call the seniors.

But one day, when in the reading room, I saw him try to kiss one of the senior girls, my awe vanished; after that I was a trifle pert and independent.

It was funny how my whole attitude then changed toward him.

I suddenly saw through the mock dignity he carried while in the dissecting room.

In vain he tried to impress me with his gravity, I only laughed in his face.

So we soon got on fairly friendly terms, as much as a humble junior and a “grave and reverend senior” could be.

Sometimes I surprised him looking at me with a quizzical, half-amused look that changed to a frown and an attempt at dignity, when he saw I was observing him.

I imagine he quite enjoyed the deference of my earlier manner, and was not a little annoyed at the discovery which had disillusioned me.

Some weeks after I had seen him trying to steal that kiss, when I was one day working on the head and face, he came up to hear me demonstrate the facial muscles.

The action of the muscles had got to be a kind of joke between us, still he always laid particular stress on that, persisting until I understood, and when practicable usually requiring me to illustrate the action.

That day I had been dissecting out the _Orbicularis Oris_--the round muscle of the mouth.

After I had described it and its relations, he asked smilingly, “And the action?

” I replied that it was used to pucker the mouth, as in whistling, and--and (mischievously) in kissing--_if you can_.

He blushed furiously, knowing then, positively, that I had, on that occasion, seen the girl slip out of his grasp.

Assuming a mock dignity he said, “I have a mind to require you to illustrate the action--it is within my province, you know.

” Then _I_ felt cheap, and blushed furiously, too.

Later in the afternoon the Demonstrator himself came round and slyly asked if I was ready to demonstrate the action of the _Orbicularis Oris_ yet, so I knew the senior assistant had told him about it.

We had been told that no parts of our subjects might be taken from the dissecting room--a necessary prohibition, as the College pledged itself to bury the skeletons intact.

(The boys used to say it was so there would not be so much confusion on Resurrection Morn.

) But each year students were intent on purloining a hand or a foot, or some part, as a souvenir.

Because forbidden, of course I had this silly ambition, too.

(We were on our honour, else it would have been easy.

) I bethought me how I could get around the restriction: Our Anatomy said that sesamoid bones were small unimportant bones sometimes found in the tendons, not properly included as a part of the skeleton.

The Demonstrator had urged us all to hunt for sesamoid bones, meaning, of course, the small adventitious ones that were a rarity.

Herein I saw my chance: One day while working around the knee, as the Demonstrator stood watching me, I asked: “Doctor S----, have any sesamoid bones been found this year?

” “No, I have heard of none.

” “They are not properly a part of the skeleton, are they?

” (Innocently) “Oh, no, no, they are very unimportant affairs--interesting only as anomalies,” he said pompously.

“Then (demurely) I suppose I may keep all the sesamoid bones I find in my subject, mayn’t I?

” He laughed and said, “Yes, you are welcome to all the sesamoid bones you find,” and started to walk away.

“Thank you, Dr. S----,” I said, with ill-concealed triumph, “I’ll take this patella when I go home to-night.

” He started, coloured, looked annoyed, then amused.

He was fairly caught, for the patella, though of course a legitimate part of the skeleton, is formed in the tendon of the _Quadriceps Extensor_, and is described by Gray, because of its mode of development, as a kind of sesamoid bone--a fact which had somehow stuck in my memory, as unimportant things will, while others of greater import sifted through.

The Demonstrator walked away looking a little chagrined, but later I saw him laughing on the sly with the seniors, and before he left he came back and said, “You may take your ‘sesamoid bone’, Miss Arnold;

you have earned it.

” I had not thought out how I could contrive to get a souvenir from my next “part,” but this same Demonstrator unwittingly helped me out.

I was at work on the wrist, and as he stood looking on he asked, “Have you found any more ‘sesamoid’ bones?

” I said No, but just then the little pisiform bone, not much bigger than a pea, stood out so conspicuously that, seeing how easy it would be to sever it from the other small bones, I purposely made a careless cut, and the little thing rolled on the table.

“Oh, my!

--well, you surely wouldn’t have me put that mite in the pail--and it won’t stay on the wrist _now_.

” He knew, and I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, that I did it purposely--his question, the prominence of the tiny bone with its slender attachment, put it in my head--“Opportunity makes the thief.

” So he let me have the pisiform, but shook his head as though he thought me incorrigible; and after that rallied me on what ruse I would resort to with my next “part,” as I could hardly take the head, or any of the vertebræ.

I have these bones somewhere now.

They gave me a lot of bother to get clean, and of what earthly use are they?

Yet perhaps as much as many of the things we scheme and work for.

It is the endeavour that counts, and it was fun to outwit the Demonstrator.

So we managed to get some amusement out of the dry bones, but were glad when the long weeks were at an end and we could go out in the sunshine after lectures instead of working in that unsightly upper room.

One of the memorable experiences of that first year was an afternoon spent with Laura Bridgman.

Helen Keller’s achievements have since familiarized us with what wonders can be done in teaching one who is deaf, dumb, and blind, but when Dr. Samuel G. Howe attempted to teach the child, Laura, it was pioneer work, and the difficulties were well-nigh insuperable.

Miss Wilkins and I were invited to meet Miss Bridgman by Mrs. Lamson, who, under Dr. Howe, had been one of the first to teach Laura to communicate with others by means of the sign language.

Mrs. Lamson told us of those early struggles, how overjoyed child and teachers were the day they succeeded in making her understand that certain signs made upon her open hand represented the door-key which they had put in her hand.

When the import of this one thing, for which they had toiled long, dawned upon the shut-in soul, she was a freed being; she went about eagerly touching other objects, teasing in her mute way to be shown their “sign,” too.

Slow, infinitely wearisome were those first steps in her education, but after a certain point, progress was astonishingly rapid.

She had not the distraction other learners have;

her thirst for knowledge was intense; her memory phenomenal--a thing once learned became a part of her; she wore out all her teachers with her insatiable desire to learn.

Among other things Dr. Howe earnestly wished to test whether the human mind, without suggestions from outside, would, in its development, evolve the idea of a Supreme Being.

Here was an unprecedented opportunity to test it, for, shut in as she was, Laura had no means of learning anything except through her teachers.

It would be a valuable contribution to psychology to learn for a surety whether, unaided, her mind would conceive the idea of a Deity.

So for years they planned and laboured with this experiment continually in view.

Assistants were rigorously instructed to exclude any hints or teachings which would suggest worship or religion--anything which could in the remotest way give her a glimmering of such ideas.

Laura was showing wonderful progress in development.

Dr. Howe’s efforts seemed on the way to success in this important test, when one of his teachers was called away at a time when he himself was in Europe.

The substitute, though carefully enjoined to observe the precautions so jealously practised, actuated by untimely zeal, and believing it to be her duty to thwart Dr. Howe in his experiment, deliberately enlightened Laura about the main orthodox teachings: she told her she had a soul to save from eternal damnation; that a just God stood ready to pardon her manifold sins, and so on.

Laboriously she poured into Laura’s listening fingers the intricate orthodox instruction concerning which she had hitherto been kept in blissful ignorance.

One can imagine the difficulties encountered in expounding to this deaf, dumb, blind, and bewildered girl (whose only religious training had been daily examples of loving-kindness), the puzzling doctrines that then passed for religious teaching.

But in that, as in all else, Laura was an apt pupil, and on Dr. Howe’s return from Europe he found the careful forethought and labour of years destroyed by that fanatical teacher.

He was nearly frantic with rage and disappointment.

I myself can never think of that bigoted interference without my own breath coming fast in anger.