A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

******

No, the hereditary Lambert is not a geographer. We are a homebody family, and I often wonder how the colonial Lamberts ever found courage to cross over from England to seventeenth-century New Jersey. They certainly stayed put when they got here; nothing but hunger and Indian raids could budge them. My father, who was a tanner and often used his best leather trying to teach me civility, was looked upon as something of a sea rover because he once drove mules along the Delaware and Hudson Canal towpath. Relatives in Ellenville, New York, where I was born, paled when they learned that Father was moving us to Little Falls.

Our pious Methodists always regarded Father as a freethinker; and wasn’t it like him to want Sylvester to be a doctor? Mr. Babcock, head of our Free Academy in West Winfield, was even more radical. A boy ought to have a college education before he started studying medicine. I had worked with the tannery gang long enough, and had learned too many of the rich, brown oaths they spat out with their chewing tobacco. Hamilton College was the place to smooth me out for medical school. Hamilton College! My mother’s hands went up at the spectral idea of a place so remote that Sylvester would have to go overnight, by train.

I entered with the class of 1903, and the thought of all my father sacrificed to send me there made me a rather earnest student—that, and his threat of more tannery, if I didn’t make good. I am thankful that Hamilton and the Syracuse Medical, which I later attended, were both small, for in small classes the instructor knows the needs and failings of every student. I was a hard worker, but not a grind. I found time for football, which toughened the tannery boy for harder years to come. Trips with the team to rival colleges were early adventures in foreign travel. Colgate, swollen with toothpaste money, was easy fruit for us then. Williams rubbed our noses in the mud to the tune of 4-0—and I wept, limping off the field.

Sometimes in my late middle age I awake from sleep swearing. I have been dreaming of a game with the Carlisle Indians. That big Injun, Red Water, is on the line opposite me, tall as a church, never losing his grin. The ball is snapped and his long arm reaches tenderly over me, gets the seat of my britches....

In 1904 I was prepared for Johns Hopkins, but Mother wanted to know what I’d be doing with myself, ’way over in Maryland. Syracuse was in New York State, anyhow, and that was far enough for anybody.

Syracuse had a faculty disproportionately large and able for so small an enrollment. The ideal of scholarship was Spartan; if a student’s nose roved from the grindstone it was pushed back again. The quizzes were little inquisitions, the recitations no place for a sleepwalker. To study under Elsner, Jacobson and Levy was to appreciate Jewish respect for scholarship. Dr. Steenson, of the Department of Pathology, had a time-keeper’s complex and you missed his eight-thirty bell at your own risk. We called him “Johnnie Cockeye,” for his devotion to the gonococcus germ. I stared through the microscope for interminable hours, seeing but little on the slides. My eyes were already going, but I could read easily. Before I came to class I knew, theoretically, what I was supposed to see under the glass—and that’s how I coped with Steenson’s sudden quizzes.

******

The very distinguished Dr. Frank William Marlow, graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, is dead now, but he crowned his career with a book called The Relative Position of Rest of the Eyes. A course under him put my eyesight, quite literally, on the blink. And this is how it came about.

Toward the end of my third year my brother became seriously ill, and I had to take him to Arizona. There I discovered, to my bald astonishment, that this Lambert had a wandering foot. In Tucson I obeyed a mad impulse and joined the crazy medical unit of a construction gang, working down the West Coast of Mexico. I had time to grow romantic when I came to the fine old hacienda of Mr. Eugene Tays, an American mining engineer. The dark eyes of his pretty daughter, Eloisa, melted my every ambition to go home and plug again at a stiff medical course. She was half Spanish, one of the influential Vegas around San Blas; but she had enough Scotch common sense to tell me to go home and graduate. When I had a practice of my own, she said, I could come back and marry her. She had to wait five years, but she kept her promise.