So I went back to Syracuse, weeks behind in my work and facing the final examination in ophthalmology. There were only three days and nights to make up lost time. I had nothing but a photographic memory to help me out. With a shrewdness born of despair I cracked the book at Marlow’s pet subjects. When I finally blinked my way into the classroom I had committed to memory a half-dozen picked pages. I was in luck; iritis, conjunctivitis, glaucoma and myopia were all there to be dealt with. I wrote the answers almost word for word from the pages my mind had photographed. Doctor Marlow was so impressed that he showed my paper around the faculty; it was fairly well decided that I had been cribbing. I might just as well have been, for after a long, tired sleep I found that I had forgotten half the stuff I had crammed. And my eyes were never the same after that ordeal.
No use going so early into the technicalities of my half-ruined sight. Microscopy became all-important to me over twenty-five years of service. I have been very fortunate in the assistants I found or trained to operate the lens for me. With glasses, my middle vision and far vision remained fairly good. And this was fortunate, too, for in my wanderings I have been required to look on many beautiful and horrible things.
Photographic memory-plates are apt to fade rapidly. Several years later, I was admitted to the Costa Rica Medical Faculty, after another feat of intensive cramming. Costa Rican professional standards are high, and not too friendly to Yankee doctors. Though I passed the very severe examination, I am not sure it was my learning that won my degree; my initiation included many cocktails with a great many influential medical officers. Those things help in Central America.
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That was in the calmer period, following four years in Mexico, where I practised medicine between raids by Carranzistas, Villistas, Yaquis. Twice I established myself with my wife and baby on the West Coast, near Eloisa’s home. Twice, because the United States Navy ordered us to escape with our lives, we left the country as refugees.
Those years were heavy with adventure. There was the time when smallpox broke over the helpless people like a cloud of poison gas; I worked alone among hundreds of peons who were anti-vaccinationists to a man and died in their own stench, hidden under dirty clothes. Time and time again I performed emergency amputations on kitchen tables, my Chinese cook giving the anesthetic. I diagnosed malaria on myself, and found my mistake when I came down with a bug of an atypical typhoid group. I lost forty pounds from dysentery and Donna Angela nourished my convalescence with iguana stew. I brought an hysteria-stricken girl back from a state like death by scaring her with a sharp knife. One day I gasped with horror, seeing a native midwife promoting childbirth by tying a woman to high rafters and jerking her legs. One afternoon I barricaded my wife and baby behind sacked beans, and performed a tonsilectomy while the Yaquis broke into a liquor warehouse. Still, there were sweet, mild months under a benevolent Aztec sun; then there came a night when I smelled burning houses and heard the wild-horse squeal of women being raped by Indians.
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One adventure I might record, if briefly. The dreaded Yaquis had joined forces with General Obregón. Colonel Antunez, like a good fellow, was bossing the Indians. They had been letting us alone at Mochis, but danger was always brooding in a place that never knew which side it was on. One day, to my discomfiture, this Colonel Antunez came limping in. He complained of pain in his groin, and a large swelling indicated an operation. He urged me to be quick; he had to be at the front, he was the only man whom Obregón trusted with the wild Yaquis.
When I got in with the knife I found a tumor that extended into the big blood vessels. Removing it was a serious major operation. As soon as he was out from under the anesthetic the war horse snorted again. He must be up and back at the front. I told him that his condition necessitated three weeks of complete rest; he got so excited that his temperature shot up and I had to stop arguing. As he recovered, his officers and their Yaquis were always around.
One morning I found his bed empty. They had smuggled him away in a jolting truck, through a cold rain. He died at Navajoa, of peritonitis or phlebitis, one of the inevitable results.