When the Doctor took a probe from the hand of a trusted assistant he was careful to ask if it was sterile ere he used it. He constantly took his juniors—in this instance, Johns Hopkins doctors—into consultation. “What do you think?” was his frequent query.
The use of unhallowed patent medicines gave him distress. “O the stuff the people put into themselves!” he exclaimed.
“Have we got a Dakin solution?” he asked presently.
“We’ve been trying to get a chloramine solution all summer,” answered one of the young physicians.
The Doctor made a careful examination of the man with the tubercular spine, who was encased in plaster from the waist up. “After all,” was his comment as he rose to his feet, “doctors don’t do anything but keep things clean.”
In the women’s ward the Harris Cot, the Torquay Cot, the Northfield Cot, the Victoria Cot, the Kingman Cot, the Exeter Cot were filled with patient souls whose faces shone as the Doctor passed. “More fresh air!” he ejaculated, and other windows were opened. Those who came from homes hermetically sealed have not always understood the Doctor’s passion for ozone. One man complained that the wind got in his teeth and a girl said that the singing on Sundays strained her stomach.
He had a remarkable memory for the history of each case. “The day after you left her heart started into fibrillation,” said an assistant. “It was there before we left,” answered the Doctor quietly.
At one bedside where an operation of a novel nature had been performed he remarked, “I simply hate leaving an opening when I don’t know how to close it.”
He never pretends to know it all: he never sits down with folded hands in the face of a difficulty or “passes the buck” to another. In his running commentary while he looks the patient over he confesses his perplexities. Yet all that he says confirms rather than shakes the patient’s confidence in him. Those whom he serves almost believe that he can all but raise the dead.
“Now this rash,” he said, “might mean the New World smallpox—but probably it doesn’t. We’ve only had two deaths from that malady on the coast. It ran synchronously with the ‘flu.’ In one household where there were three children and a man, one child and the man got it and two children escaped it.