Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

the most reckless. We should charge up an error of judgment or of technic or in other cases wipe that physician's record clean from censure who operates on a patient in extremis. This matter of fair surgical mortality must be formulated."

The College of Surgeons may some day tell a surgeon how many patients he must not lose. You and I shall then be safer on the operating table.

All this which has happened in American surgery within the past decade is only one more success in the eralong endeavor of medical men to keep their profession clean and purged.

...

There is no physician in the world today who does not know the revered oath of Hippocrates, with its "With purity and holiness will I pass my life and practice my art. . . . Into whatInto what ever houses I enter I will go for the advantage of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption. . . . While I continue to keep this oath inviolate may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of my art, respected always by all men; but should I break through and violate this oath may the reverse be my lot." They go out into the world from the schools, young doctors, with their eyes on the stars and the sentiment of this great vow ringing in their hearts.

Two thousand years and more ago that vow was taken. Another call rang out in the Middle Ages. Its vibrations tingle in the souls of physicians to-day. Guy de Chauliac, in France, in the 14th Century, set this inspiring code:

"Let the surgeon be bold in all sure things and fearful in all dangerous things; let him avoid all faulty treatment and practices. He ought to be gracious to the sick, considerate to his associates, cautious in his prognostications. Let him be modest, dignified, gentle, pitiful, and merciful; not covetous nor an extortionist of money. But rather let his reward be according to his word, to the means of his patient, to the

quality of the issue and to his own dignity."

And now comes another voice, a third oath, practically and unsentimentally worded as becomes our practical times. The twentieth century gives it to the world from the new continents of the Americans. It is the oath of the Fellows of the American College of Surgeons. It runs, simply:

"Upon my honor as a gentleman, I hereby declare that I will not practice the division of fees, either directly or indirectly in any manner whatsoever."

As for us laymen, we may stretch ourselves out and raise our faces to the ether funnel with far more security these days than ever before.

It is well to know that your hospital is on the list of those which have adopted the "minimum standard" of the American College of Surgeons. Why not ask this question before they take your clothes away from you—indeed, before you register? Investigators of the College of Surgeons are constantly inspecting hospitals of the country and are recommending them for favorable classification in the College as soon as they comply with the five requirements.

As to your surgeon-fellowship in the American College of Surgeons is not necessary to good and honest surgery. He may be able, though too young in practice to have gained the right to enter. The association, too, is too young to have sifted out and taken in all worthy men. Your surgeon's application may be in that year-long process (sometimes more) of being granted. Or, God bless him! he may be only one of those thousands of general practitioners in small towns and out-of-the-way places, who fight all their lives against death and suffering with pills and knives, hot-water bottles or any other weapon that is best and handiest to bring us into the world and to keep us here as long as they can. He, this family doctor, could not belong to the American College of Surgeons because not eighty per cent of his work is surgery.

If you want to measure your surgeon, measure him by the kind of hospital he tries to send you to. That's your sure and safe yardstick for surgeons and doctors these days.

Can he secure your admission to a hospital that has adopted the "minimum standard" of the American College of Surgeons? If he can, he is probably all right. The hospital, under these new rules, remember, is not primarily admitting you; it is admitting him to practice within its walls, and it has power under the "minimum standard” to call him to account.

If he cannot get you admitted into an endorsed hospital-look out; something is wrong.

"There are a hundred so-called hospitals in this city," said a famous surgeon, "which are nothing but boarding houses. Some down-and-out woman, instead of starting a boarding house, rents an old residence in some once fashionable district, puts a lot of beds within the rooms, gets a secondhand operating table, a gas stove, an old wash boiler to boil instruments in, fits up a so-called operating room, and then starts what she calls a hospital for surgical or maternity cases. She usually charges very high prices to lure the well-to-do. God help a man or woman who gets into a place like that!

"You'll find, usually, that when a physician or surgeon does resort to such places he is out of caste in the good hospitals."

But a hall-mark is being put on hospitals and on surgeons too in America these days, so that you and I can keep ourselves in safe hands if we only ask the hospital whether it is under the

[blocks in formation]

portunity to pass on the work you are going to do on me?"

If he answers "yes," you may know that he is a controlled surgeon. If he answers "no," and cannot explain that answer, show him the door.

There will be other surgeons round the corner-in this new day of surgery who will not stand by the old fogy code of not taking another's man's case, who will help you. They will understand why you wanted to change doctors; and they will have thousands of doctors behind them, approving their action, for they will consider it only a part of American surgery's big clean-up.

The American College of Surgeons, during the past eight years, has spent more than a third of a million dollars in establishing itself. Of this amount in the last five years over $219,000 has been expended to better the environment in which surgery is performed, namely, to better the hospitals.

This is the money of surgeons themselves with the exception of $90,000 granted by the Carnegie Foundation. Six thousand surgeons are now paying the expenses of the work.

Medical schools are recommending their students for internship in the "minimum-standard" hospitals; people of wealth are learning to make their contributions only to hospitals that have adopted the "minimum standard."

And now the College of Surgeons is expecting you and me the public-to understand what they are trying to do.

I have said that in certain towns, notably on the Pacific Coast, mass meetings have been held to inform the public of the new movement. A mass meeting may be held in your town some day. It will probably afford you an opportunity to see and hear the leading surgeons of your community.

These mass meetings have seemed to be pretty drastic methods with some surgeons of the old school. But surgery must always be drastic even when it is performed on the professors of surgery themselves.

Bank Directors

BY LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

HE house was his wife's but would

THE

come to him after her death. Those had been the terms of the will of his uncle, a domineering old man with something more than the usual masculine love of authority, so that he had contrived to carry his to the grave with him.

James Ellington wondered whether it might be concerning the house that his wife wished to see him, after all these years. Was it, perhaps, to ask his legal advice?

He was slightly bewildered not only by the circumstance of having been sent for, but by the fact that he was obliged to watch his step a trifle on a stairway once so familiar.

He had noted a different wall paper in the hall; and the prints showing jollyfaced monks drunk in a wine cellarpictures that he and his daughter had once quarreled about, he putting her finally in her place, wit a good deal of satisfaction-no longer hung on either side of the mirror. Of course! Yet it galled him. For he had his own natural passion for direction.

His daughter paused, her hand on the knob of her mother's door. She had waited until the very last minute to give him the truth that was hateful to her.

"I sent for you because in her delirium mother calls for you. She talks of the days when she was a girl-when you both cared.”

So! This came as a distinct shock to him. He felt of his tie with heavy fingers, squared his shoulders ever SO slightly, blinked slowly twice.

Some one opened the door at the other end of the hall.

It was Miss Clytie
It was Miss Clytie

Latimer. One saw her neat, handsome figure silhouetted.

He wondered how she would greet him, just what she would say to him. Of course, she had always sided with his wife one of those friendships built not so much on a personal loyalty as on feminine loyalty to the feminine. Well, they had managed, these three women between them, to make a sort of matrimonial pariah of him; to stamp him— him, mind you, with all his good brains and abilities-as a man unable to manage and dominate his own household.

But even if Miss Clytie Latimer might not have been entirely equal to the situation (if one could fancy Miss Clytie not being perfectly equal to any situation) the awkward necessity was cut short. His daughter opened the door of her mother's room and stood aside to let him enter.

"Go softly, please. Do not disturb

her."

She entered also and closed the door after her.

James Ellington shot a lightning glance at her that spoke unbroken thunder. He liked too well to give directions to be able tolerantly to receive them. Then, good Lord! directions from this upstart daughter of his concerning her mother and his wife! Well, he had indeed been needed at home! He slipped again into his relation to these women— like a hand into an old glove-and took certain quick resolutions that fastened it, so to speak, with a firm snap round the wrist. For he had certain tenacities, old-fashioned if you like, one of which was that a woman once a man's wife was always his wife, despite whatever incompatibility and separation. And the same

applied not less to a man's child. Let this girl with her delicate air side with her mother all she liked-even to the point of a physical likeness-she could not get away from the fact that she was his child. There are a few grim facts in the world that you cannot brush aside. He remembered well enough, too, the time when she was little and helpless and dependent and he gave her directions; told her not to hold her fork in her left hand, ordered her not to speak until she was spoken to; and she obeyed him, meekly enough, oh, meekly enough, I can tell you! And now, disapproval, directions, orders!

James Ellington brushed the annoying thought of her aside, with his hand, and went to his wife's bedside.

She lay pale and beautiful in the darkened room, singularly girlish. He felt

anew his old astonishment that a little frail person like that could ever have had sufficient strength to separate herself from him. He had always consistently known that woman was the weaker vessel. But the fragility of this woman, frangibility one would have said, had never struck him quite so forcibly. So slender! So little! Such delicate hands! Why, you could take her up and break her! And this was the woman who had defied him, and defying him, had effectually barred the way to his ambitions.

For his domestic defeat had gone hard with him. But for this miserable affair, this absurd incompatibility, he and his wife living apart all these years-ten years now, she in one town, he in another, not fifteen miles away-he would have been (he felt no doubt in the world of this) a successful man to-day, one of the directors of the Citizens Bank of Beverly, instead of merely its solicitor.

[graphic]

"GO SOFTLY, PLEASE. DO NOT DISTURB HER"

It all lay with the President and Chief Director of the bank, Crowderby, and with Crowderby's prejudice against divorced or "separated" men. Crayton, Jenks, and Kimberly, the other directors, would no doubt have overlooked a thing of that sort, since Ellington had qualities that would have made him a valuable ally. They had prejudices, too, to be sure, and two of them were church wardens, yet he felt he could have established himself with them notwithstanding. But Crowderby was a masterful person, bullheaded and old-fashioned. Well, for his part, Ellington understood Crowderby's viewpoint perfectly. He was old-fashioned himself, damn it! But what hurt was that he knew that Crowderby's real reason had at bottom less to do with prej

[graphic][subsumed]

HE ALWAYS FELT A SENSE OF BITTERNESS WHEN HE DEPARTED

udice than with shrewd business judgment. Crowderby was a shrewd business man, with keen insight; a born director. You couldn't fool Crowderby. And Crowderby's unspoken argument, Ellington knew, would have been this: Why should a man who has failed in the domination and direction of his own home; who has been unable to rule a little frail woman like Ellington's wife, why should such a man be consulted as to the best way to manage a bank, the investment of other people's moneys, the placing of important loans, the bank's general policy, what people to favor and what ones not to favor; when to be open-handed and when to squeeze hard? Yes; and the worst of it was Crowderby was right.

If there had been anything dramatic to justify the separation; some other man, some scandal, even, on his own part! But no, there was nothing to show but incompatibility, and that silence and extreme refinement of his wife which threw more blame upon him

than many vituperative words could have done.

And all this was at the bottom of the fact-yes, he was shrewd enough to know that-that these men met without him, sat about the large glass-topped table in the directors' room of the bank, Crowderby generally far back in his chair, with his elbows on its arms, his fingers spread and their tips fitted neatly together, heavily abetting and supporting one another. Yes, though no word had been spoken, Ellington knew this was why these four men sat in the comfortable green-leather chairs without him.

They called him in, sometimes, but never for consultation; only for legal advice. At such times he did not feel himself privileged to sit far back in one of the leather chairs; and he was far from putting the tips of his fingers together contemplatively. Instead, he was more likely to sit on the edge of the chair, so as to shuffle his papers about more readily on the table, the more

« ForrigeFortsæt »