On the next page he read that Homer had eventually worked closely with Dr. Valentine Mott, who was considered the best surgeon in the world at the time, and Homer’s technical skills had been favorably compared to Mott’s. But then he read how he and Mott had nearly come to blows over the issue of anesthesia. With mounting disbelief, Mitt read that Dr. Homer Fuller believed that the pain people experienced served a specific purpose as a punishment from God and that anesthesia was the work of the devil in denying it.
“Good God!” Mitt voiced out loud. For a moment he stared up at the ceiling in disbelief. He was shocked and even embarrassed that he was related to someone who could think something so anti-scientific.
After a shake of his head, he went back to skimming the article. The very next page confirmed what Dr. Harington had said about Dr. Otto Fuller. Robert Pendleton wrote that Otto, who had worked with Dr. William Halsted and was considered his equal in surgical skill, had specifically and openly mocked germ theory during one of his Bellevue Hospital amphitheater operations in front of hundreds of student doctors and nurses. He was quoted as saying that the concept of germ theory was based on the craziest idea he’d ever heard, namely that hundreds of invisible particles mysteriously swarmed around in the air. Ridiculous, he was quoted as saying.
“Ridiculous is right!” Mitt said out loud. Although Mitt knew that people shouldn’t be judged in hindsight, at the same time he was embarrassed to be directly related to such a scientific philistine and to have held him up as a medical inspiration for his entire life.
Almost afraid to have the worst confirmed about Benjamin and Clarence, Mitt went back to skimming Pendleton’s unpublished article. On the very next page, he read that Dr. Benjamin Fuller — as Dr. Harington had said — was indeed vehemently against the informed consent movement, firm in his unswerving belief that charity patients had an obligation to offer up their bodies for the benefit of medical research. Benjamin had even gone to the extent of advocating absolutely no constraints on physicians in terms of their research projects and even whims, and he specifically was against any kind of research review boards, believing such restrictions were anti-science and a drag to the advancement of medical knowledge.
Before he went on to the section about Clarence Fuller, Mitt took the time to again glance up at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. Did he want to share the article with his father or not? As much as what he was learning was upsetting to him, he sensed it would be more distressing to his father, who constantly made positive references to their forebearers’ legacy. With a shrug and without a conclusion, Mitt went on to the final pages.
As he feared, learning about Clarence’s early advocacy of lobotomies was perhaps the most distressing aspect of the entire article, particularly as it was suggested that Clarence’s motivations for doing so revolved around his own personal career aspirations. Mitt read that Clarence wanted to be chief of Bellevue’s Psychiatric Division, which he felt he deserved as recognition for all the work he’d expended helping the then-psychiatry chief, Dr. Menas S. Gregory, get the new Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital funded and constructed.
Mitt was aghast to read that Clarence performed over two hundred lobotomies before stopping them and then trying to hide his initial advocacy. Even more disturbing, Mitt learned he’d done over forty on children, some as young as four. Apparently Clarence believed he was in direct competition for the departmental chiefdom with Dr. Lauretta Bender. Bender was head of Pediatric Psychiatry and was gathering worldwide renown from doing electroconvulsive therapy on children with moderate success.
Mitt clicked to the last page of the article, the appendix, where he hoped to find an explanation of what constituted the newly discovered sources that provided so much information about his relatives. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much. All Robert Pendleton wrote was that he had uncovered a vast trove of heretofore unknown Bellevue Hospital patient records going back to the end of the eighteenth century and extending well into the twentieth that had been collected by Dr. Clarence Fuller.
“That’s it?” Mitt questioned aloud with disappointment. The terse statement begged the important questions of where these records had been found and where were they now. With a bit of disgust, he snapped closed his laptop. He’d had quite enough of the article and quite enough of the day. With some effort, he got to his feet and padded into his bedroom, ready to turn out the lights literally and figuratively. He was desperate for rest.
While he was brushing his teeth, he paused. In the background he thought he heard something — he could just make out the indistinct sound of a crowd of people crying out in pain and distress, possibly undergoing surgery without anesthesia. He shook his head in amazement, dismissing yet another demonstration of the suggestive power of his imagination.
Chapter 14
Wednesday, July 3, 5:30 a.m.
When his phone alarm went off, Mitt could hardly believe that seven hours had passed since he’d turned off his light — it felt like only an hour or two at best.
With great effort, he swung his legs out over the side of the bed and sat up to allow the cobwebs in his mind to clear. Unfortunately, it had not been the rejuvenating night’s sleep he’d counted on; he’d been beset with the same disturbing, inexplicable, and exhausting dream he’d had two nights ago. Again, he’d been chased down endless, two-toned yellow-tan corridors with curious rounded pilasters and arched ceilings, the likes of which he’d never seen in real life. To make the experience more disturbing, he never did get to see who or what was chasing him, so he had no idea of what he was running from.
Immediately recognizing that he didn’t have the luxury of pondering the meaning of his recurrent anxiety dream, he stood up, allowed a wave of dizziness to pass, and hurried into his bathroom. There was no time to spare, as he’d purposefully set his alarm for as late as possible. In the future, allowing himself to sleep till 5:30 would be a rare pleasure. Dr. Kumar had specifically said that he and Andrea were expected to have seen all their assigned patients prior to the beginning of surgical rounds at 6:30. The reason Mitt thought he could get away with sleeping so late this morning was that he currently had only one postoperative patient, Bianca Perez, and checking on her progress would take only a minute or two, he assumed, since her surgery and immediate postoperative course had gone so smoothly.
As Mitt rapidly shaved, he indulged in a bit of black humor, a defense mechanism he’d learned as a medical student: The good side of having three out of four patients die meant that his personal rounds were going to be remarkably easy and brief.
Mitt glared into the mirror and silently reprimanded himself for such a thought. Black humor notwithstanding, that the idea of a “good” side to three deaths had even occurred to him was an embarrassment that made him wonder if he was losing his humanity. A second later, Mitt shook his head to acknowledge he didn’t have time for such philosophical ramblings and went back to shaving. What he preferred to believe was that the first two days of his surgical residency had to have been a totally aberrant set of circumstances, pure chance, a kind of trial by fire, and that the current day, and indeed the entire rest of his residency experience, would be completely different. With that reassuring thought in mind, he finished his morning preparations, dressed rapidly while eating a banana, and five minutes later was out his apartment door, pulling on his white coat as he descended the open central stairs.