Dear and Glorious Physician (19 page)

He looked at the sulky slave, who had been watching him with rapidly blinking eyes. “Look on your wife with love,” he admonished. “Say not, ‘She belongs to me, and she will serve me!’ Say in your heart, rather, ‘This is my beloved wife, and what can I do to make her the happiest of women, so that she will say she is married to the kindest and noblest of men?’”

As they moved away, Lucanus said, “Then this is not an organic disease?”

Keptah stopped and pondered. He finally said, “There is no separating the flesh from the spirit, for it is through the flesh that the spirit manifests itself. You are wondering how it is that some people contract illnesses in epidemics and others do not. Hippocrates talked of natural immunity in those who escape. One of his pupils believed that those who escape manufacture some essence in themselves which repels the disease. But why? Could it be that certain temperaments resist infection whereas others do not? Immunity? If so, then it is the immunity of the spirit, though other physicians do not believe this. I am not speaking of good and evil. I am speaking only of temperament.”

They came to the last bed. Here lay a youth in high fever, his right leg contracted so that the muscles stood out on it like ridges. He had a sharp dark face with unusually intelligent, bold eyes, and an angry expression. Keptah looked at one of the attendant slaves. “I have said that this leg must be wrapped constantly in hot woolen compresses, day and night, as hot as he can endure it. Give me no excuses!” Vexed, he lifted his hand and struck the slave on the cheek. “Have we nothing here but men and women who seek only their own pleasures and satisfactions? Go to!”

He looked down at the young man on the bed. He said to Lucanus, “Here is a youth of a haughty, proud and inconsiderate nature, overweening in self-esteem, and arrogant. He despises ignorance and dullness. He has a mind like the thin blade of a very sharp knife. He loathes his fellow man, who rarely has his intelligence. He has no patience, no kindliness. I have taught him to read and write; he has access to my own library; he comes and goes at will. He never thinks with his heart, but only with his brain. You will discover that such as he are very susceptible to this crippling disease. You will also discover that the more stupid, the more bovine, rarely contract it, even among children.”

Diomed was smiling with mingled pride and ill-humor. “Thank you, Master, for your words about my intellect,” he said. He was evidently in great pain, but his pride would permit no expression of it.

“I am not flattering you,” said Keptah. “It was almost inevitable that you have this miserable illness, which, I am afraid, is going to leave you with a limping leg.”

“I care little for my body if I may nourish my mind,” said Diomed.

Keptah looked at Lucanus. “You will observe this trait in people afflicted like this. Why should a man despise his flesh, and the flesh of others, when it is a marvelous invention of God’s and can be more beautiful than any other living thing? It is through his flesh that he communicates with others. Men like Diomed wish no communication. They crave only obeisance and flattery for their truly fine minds. I say to parents with children like these, ‘Teach your child to love, and to give, and train him in reverence for God’.”

Lucanus’ lip curled, but he said nothing. Keptah said to Diomed, “I shall have some books sent to you this afternoon. I see you have finished those I have previously sent. In the meantime there is that maiden, Leda, who often writes the letters for the Lady Aurelia. She is a pretty child, intelligent and loving, and she adores you. Take her love, but return it with your whole heart. I know such a thing will be hard for you, but you can will yourself to love if you wish. Nothing is impossible with a seeking and determined and intellectual mind. The Lady Aurelia is so attached to this girl that she has told me that when she wishes to marry she will receive her freedom. Will you withhold that gift from her?”

Diomed began to sneer. Then his face softened, and he suddenly turned it to his pillow. His thin shoulders heaved. Keptah said softly, “There have been more souls saved through humble tears than all the potions in the world.”

Lucanus said defiantly in himself, He simplifies too much. But he was moved by the sobbing of Diomed, who could not control himself though all his muscles were contracted in the effort. Keptah said, “Hasten and get well, Diomed. I shall need you as my assistant when you can feel pity and love for others.”

Diomed reared his tear-wet face from the pillow, and joy shone in his eyes. He caught Keptah’s hand. “You will let me attend you, Master?” he cried, incredulously. Keptah smiled. “You will make an excellent helper, Diomed. When you love and have mercy, and feel another’s pain in your own body.”

They returned to the bed of Hebra, who was as one asleep, gently breathing. Keptah ordered screens, which were placed about the bed. He drove Glaucus from the enclosure. He placed a tray on the small table, and on it were needles and sutures and a large and two small scalpels. He said to Lucanus, “It is time for you to see your first operation. If you vomit, kindly use this bucket, but say nothing. If you faint, I shall let you lie. There is a life to save. I will need your help. Take up that pad of linen and dip it in this pungent oil. There is infection in the very air.”

Lucanus began to tremble. But he obeyed orders silently. He looked down at the drugged girl, who was sweet in her slumber. He was filled with a passionate commiseration. Why should any god so afflict a child who wanted only children and the love of her husband, and a tranquil life? Oh, You who do this evil to men, I despise You! he thought. Would not even the basest of men be more compassionate?

Keptah exposed Hebra’s gleaming, taut belly. He palpated it with care. Then with sure strokes of his scalpel, as one drawing a careful diagram, he drew the knife over the white flesh. Its path was followed by a red streak, which widened, opened, like a hungry mouth.

Lucanus sickened, but he watched. Now the shining red muscles were exposed, sinewy, threaded with pulsing veins. Keptah pushed them aside deftly and gently, and said, “Now we will use the Egyptian hooks to ligature all blood vessels, to keep the field of operation as free as possible and to prevent bleeding to death. Observe these vessels, and the pulses of the heart which throb them! Is it not all perfect? Who can look on this and not reverence God in his heart? He has designed a man as wonderfully as He has designed the suns and their planets. Ah, be careful; use those small pads of linen to keep the wound open. Do not let your fingers touch any part of the wound, for there is poison on your fingers and in the air. The Egyptians knew that many hundreds of years ago, but the Greeks and Romans deride it, asking, ‘Where is the poison? We do not see it’. There are millions of things in the universe that men cannot see; nevertheless, they are there.”

Hebra began to groan, to talk incoherently. “It is her assaulted flesh which speaks,” said Keptah. “The spirit is also protesting the ignominy of its passiveness under the drug. There are those who say drugs subdue the spirit; it is not so. Does she feel the pain? Surely. But when she awakens she will not remember that she suffered. She will say, ‘I was as one who slept through a storm’.”

Lucanus, filled with pity for the girl, said deep in his soul to her, “Rest, endure, be of courage. We will save you, dear child.” He directed the full force of his mind to her, to reassure her. Perhaps it was only the drugs she had taken, and the stupefying wine, but all at once she sighed, and relaxed. The tight muscles became soft, no longer tensed.

The gray-pink and glistening intestines were exposed now. Here they were, in their convolutions, slipping mass after mass. They palpitated, writhing a little, and Lucanus spoke to them kindly in his mind, and they too became flaccid. With the most exquisite care Keptah pushed them aside, and, like a burgeoning evil, a huge opalescent bladder ascended from beneath them, pushing them aside ruthlessly, a cloudy and glimmering bladder seething with corruption and shifting patterns of blood. It bobbed restlessly over the intestines. It was attached from below by a rope deeper in color than itself.

“This is the vital moment,” said Keptah, working with sure hands. “We will now look very carefully at the ovary. The slightest carelessness will explode this bladder and fill her whole belly with death.” He exposed the yellow-white ovary. “Aha!” said Keptah. “It is in good health. We shall save it after all. You are too preoccupied. Use more pads, hold the flesh aside firmly.”

All at once the whole scene dimmed and flickered before Lucanus’ eyes. The smell of blood almost overpowered him. His legs trembled violently, and there was a huge dry retching in his stomach. He said to himself, If I fail this girl, if I faint, who will help? He looked at the wicked, restless bladder, forced calm upon his natural human revulsion. He tried to observe the layers of fat over the peritoneum, yellowish and wet as sheep’s fat. He pressed the pads harder against the yawning mouth of the wound, and his muscles tensed, and he sweated. Keptah was neatly tying the lengths of the cord of the bladder in several places, pulling the linen thread tightly. The opalescent corruption dimmed to a milkiness; the patterns of blood darkened. Then, with a slow motion of the scalpel, Keptah cut the cord. The bladder lay quiet on the intestines.

With the utmost care and slowness Keptah lifted it from its position and dropped it on the tray. Lucanus’ eyes were swimming, and drops of water dripped from his face. “Watch how I sew these layers now, as neatly as a seamstress,” said the physician. “Not an error must be made in the sutures.” He employed a crisscross pattern, using a clear thread, which he explained was catgut. “The body will absorb these in time, and the joinings will be firmer than before. Some physicians use linen thread, which the body does not absorb, and which later causes difficulties.”

The evil bladder was as large as a curled, newborn child on the tray. Taking infinite pains, the physician brought each layer of the belly together, sewed it firmly. “The fat is difficult; it sometimes separates from the thread, or tears apart. There. We have it now. And now for the skin, which is very tough. Here we use linen thread, which we will cut away in a week.”

The belly had become miraculously flat. The girl groaned over and over, catching her breath with desperate sobs. “She is awakening,” said Keptah. He tied the last expert knot. He dipped a cloth in hot water and wrung it out and put it over the girl’s heart, then he dipped another cloth and wrapped it over her feet, and another over her wrists. He bent his head and pressed it against the girl’s breast. “Rapid, but strong. She will not have shock, which is much to be feared. Use the bucket close to her mouth, and hold her head.”

He wrapped large white strips of cloth over the body as though they were grave wrappings. He stood back and regarded the girl contentedly. He was very calm. He glanced at Lucanus, and saw that the youth’s tunic was wet and dripping. He laughed gently. “You have endured it very well. I congratulate you. Drink this wine as fast as possible. I may even say I am proud of you.”

The girl opened dull eyes. Keptah bent over her. “It is all over now, my child. You are well.” The girl moaned, began to cry. Keptah crushed more acrid leaves and pressed the potion into her mouth, gave her water. She swallowed feebly. She was as white as death. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep cures more illnesses than any doctor’s art.”

He nodded at Lucanus. “I noticed, with pleasure, that you have kept count of the restraining pads. Now you will clean up this mess, and you will visit her in a few hours.”

“Glaucus,” whispered the girl. Keptah moved aside the screen and summoned the husband, who came in like the wind. He knelt beside his wife and laid his cheek to hers, sobbing. “It is much more rigorous on the husband,” observed Keptah, wryly.

He left Lucanus to the filthy and repulsive job of removing all evidences of the operation. Lucanus’ hands moved weakly and with wincing. He washed the scalpels and replaced them on the tray. The smell of the blood was sickening, and all the effluvia of the violated body. Why could not a slave have done this labor? He was irritated. When he emerged from the screens he found Keptah genially conversing with the other patients and giving orders. Keptah said to him, “You will not always have an assistant. Too often a surgeon must stand alone and do everything himself.” He looked at Lucanus, and hastily caught up a bucket, and Lucanus vomited violently into it until it seemed that his very entrails and stomach and liver would leave his gaping mouth. Keptah was patient. “Again I congratulate you, my Lucanus. It is better to indulge one’s self after the emergency than during it. Go and lie down until you are ready for Cusa.”

Lucanus wiped his sour mouth. “I prefer to go home.”

“No,” said Keptah. “You would dwell too much on what has happened. Gird yourself; continue with your work.”

The autumnal winds mourned like the voices of a multitude of doves when Lucanus left the schoolroom. The gray rains drifted against the palms and the trees and through the colonnades of the house of Diodorus, and now, suddenly, the sea-voiced gale whitened every leaf, every branch and trunk, blanched the grass. A muted howling rose from the earth, a most dolorous sound. Lucanus pulled the hood of his mantle over his head and gazed somberly at the bleached and writhing garden. The fountains complained in distress; the statues ran with gray water; the flowers bent their heads in docile suffering. Lucanus was young; he forgot that tomorrow all would again be smiling and warm, the palms glittering, the birds singing to an azure sky. As it was now, to him, so it would always be, torn with ragged anguish, replying feebly to the wind that roared in from the sea, bending endlessly and helplessly like the grasses of the ghostly Elysian fields.

All is dead, said Lucanus to himself. All is beaten, all is gray, all is inundated. All is withered and drowned and lost. What I have loved is gone. Lucanus wiped his wet face with a corner of his mantle and felt a most frightful desolation in himself, a hollowness unfilled by a single dream or hope. His young flesh was weighty on his bones, as if that flesh were old and drenched and sodden with earth. He looked at the vaporous sky, as colorless as death itself, and he wanted to weep, but there were no tears in him, only an aridness where nothing grew and nothing stirred.

He longed to go home, yet he shrank from the thought. Iris, his mother, would be there, her beautiful face white with silent grief; she would gaze at him questioningly, and he had no answers for her. She was old; she was thirty-one. The elderly possessed no wisdom, only queries. Only youth had the replies, and it could reply only when it was happy. In truth, said Lucanus in his heart, there is no answer to nothingness. And nothingness is all that there is. And then he was filled with a wild and tumultuous rage, and he lifted clenched fists against the sky. “I shall defeat You!” he exclaimed. “I shall deprive You of Your sacrifices!”

The sea-voiced gale blew against his face and body, and he felt it as a mocking and challenge. He began to walk through the gardens,trembling with fury, and came to the open portico before the house. The carved bronze doors were shut. He stood and stared at them, and felt them obdurate. He strode to them without thinking and struck them with a fist. When they opened he said to the slave, “I wish to talk with your master, Diodorus.”

The chief of the hall regarded him impudently. “The master is in his library. He has not spoken for many days. Do you wish to intrude upon him, Lucanus? He will not see you; he has refused his Roman friends. Will he see the son of a freedman?”

Lucanus thrust open the door and hurled the slave aside. The spectral and watery light from the sky fell onto the black and white marble of the hall, and Lucanus went over it, his sandals echoing, his white mantle flowing about him in ghostly folds. The cool dank air of the house was like the air from a tomb, musty and unliving. No voice or movement broke the silence except the slapping of Lucanus’ feet. The archway of the library was shrouded in thick brown cloth, and this Lucanus pushed away. Only when he stepped into the library did he suddenly wonder why he had come and what he was doing here.

Diodorus was sitting at a pale marble table, many books rolled about him, his head in his hands. He was as still as a statue carved in dark bronze, for even his tunic was of a deep color. When he heard the rustling of the curtain he dropped his hands heavily and lifted a lightless face and stared at Lucanus blankly, Lucanus, whom he had not seen since the death of Rubria.