Mitt started forward but paused on the threshold. He couldn’t resist a quick glance back down the corridor from which they’d come. Although it was only for a fraction of a second, the fleeting image his eyes caught startled him. He’d expected to see Charlene, but instead, he caught a glimpse of the surgerized crowd. They were silent, standing stock-still with venomous, angry expressions and holding their removed limbs or organs, all still bloody. With the closest spirits a mere twenty feet away, Mitt guessed that the gruesome crowd had been behind them for a good part of the long walk, and he shuddered. He’d sensed he and Lashonda were being followed by something but certainly not by such a horde and not so closely.
Mitt quickly entered and shut the supply room door behind him even though he suspected it wasn’t a barrier to such ghostly spirits. He then turned and let his flashlight beam circle the room. In contrast to the cluttered basement rooms Mitt had glanced into, the housekeeping supply room was almost totally empty. A number of open bottles and cans of cleaner lined the shelves along one wall. There was also a rack for mops and brooms, which contained a half dozen or so.
“The records are back here in a closet off the lavatory,” Lashonda called out, waving for Mitt. She’d retreated to the very rear of the storeroom and was standing next to an opened interior door. Her flashlight was on the floor in the main part of the storeroom with its lens angled upward. By the time Mitt got back there, she had stepped into a small toilet room and opened an interior closet. Inside, in plain sight and stacked chest-high, were five cardboard bankers boxes.
“Here they are,” Lashonda announced while giving the top box a tap. “Here are the records presumably collected by your ancestor Dr. Clarence Fuller.”
“Are all the boxes full?” Mitt questioned. It appeared to be more material than he’d expected.
“Pretty much,” Lashonda said. “Your ancestors were very busy people. I’d guess each box has fifty to a hundred records or thereabouts.” She then bent down and pointed to the box on the bottom. “This one has records that go back all the way to the 1820s and range up until around the 1860s or thereabouts. As near as I could determine, they were mostly Dr. Homer Fuller’s patients. But don’t count on that. I certainly didn’t go through all of them, just read a few here and there. On the top of each box there is a range of dates of the contained records.”
“So, the higher you go in the stack, the more recent the records?” Mitt asked. He was amazed at the sheer number of records seemingly involved and could imagine the excitement Robert Pendleton must have felt when he’d stumbled onto them.
“That’s correct. The lowest down is mostly for Homer, next up Otto, then Benjamin, and these on the top are Dr. Clarence Fuller’s lobotomy records.” Lashonda ended by patting the box on the very top.
“I know we don’t have a lot of time,” Mitt said as he put his flashlight on the floor next to Lashonda’s and also made a point of angling the lens upward as much as it would go but in the opposite direction, making the ambient light in the room more evenly disbursed. “And I appreciate your promise to your mother that the records mustn’t leave here, but I’d like to get an idea of them with the time we have. Do you mind if I check out the lower box first? I might as well do it in chronological order.”
“We’re here for you, so of course I don’t mind. In fact, let me help you.” With that said, Lashonda began handing the uppermost boxes out to Mitt, who stacked them in reverse order next to their flashlights. As he did so, he noticed the dates written on the top.
“Here’s the last one,” Lashonda said, handing it to Mitt, “which I believe contains mostly Homer’s cases.”
“Perfect,” Mitt said. He put the box on top of the others and lifted off its lid. Inside was a stack of patient records that seemed to be written in a rather flamboyant but mostly readable cursive style on yellowed paper. Being particularly careful and respectful, he reached in and lifted out a short stack. Randomly, he picked one from the middle. The others he carefully placed face down on the top of the opened box. The record he was holding was a single page, and he had to angle it carefully in the meager light to be able to read it, as the ink had faded.
The date on the record was August 8, 1854, and at the bottom was Homer’s impressive signature, which gave Mitt a real sense he was looking into his family’s past. The patient’s name was John Mercer, age forty-three, described as a one-eyed farrier. Mitt had no idea what that meant until he learned a little later in the narrative that John had been attempting to shoe a horse when the animal collapsed on him, severely damaging his right leg from just above the knee down to the ankle, which caused unremitting pain. The above narrative was all under a heading: Problem. There were three more sections under the headings: Operation, Procedure, and Outcome.
Mitt looked up at Lashonda, who was peering over his shoulder at the record. “It’s like a miniature time machine,” he said.
Lashonda nodded. “I know what you mean. It must be especially so for you since it involves a relative.”
“It is amazing reading it, knowing he wrote this with his hand.”
“Maybe even moments after he’d done the operation,” Lashonda added.
“Perhaps,” Mitt said. He had no idea of the timing, but it didn’t matter. Going back to the record, he continued reading with difficulty as the ink intensity varied significantly: After bringing Mr. Mercer into the operating theatre filled with attentive students and asking him in front of all the witnesses if he wished to go ahead and have his damaged leg off or if he wished not to have it off, he responded to have it off, and four stout men took ahold of him and held him fast.
Suddenly Mitt stopped reading. Instead, his eyes snapped back to the top of the page to ascertain that the date was indeed 1854, and it was. Like every medical student, he was aware that anesthesia was first used at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1846, so he was certain it was available at Bellevue in 1854. The fact that Homer chose not to use it, as Robert Pendleton had written, horrified Mitt, even as he recognized the role played by hindsight. He felt strongly that his relative’s rejection of the benefits of anesthesia, spurred by his supposed belief that denying natural pain was the devil’s work, bordered on the insanely delusional. It was also brutal, cruel, and remarkably cold-blooded even if the amputation could be done in a mere nine seconds.
“What’s the matter?” Lashonda questioned. She sensed Mitt’s emotional reaction.
“I’m embarrassed to tell you,” he said. “But this is a case of my ancestor doing a leg amputation without anesthesia eight years after anesthesia had been introduced. And remember, amputation of this kind required sawing through the largest bone in the human body.”
“Lordy!” Lashonda commented with a distinctly dismayed expression along with a disbelieving shake of her head.
“That’s my reaction, too,” Mitt said. “It’s perplexing as well as shameful.” With a shake of his own head, he went back to reading John Mercer’s short medical record. Unfortunately, the rest was just as bad. The man died of overwhelming sepsis after suffering through three post-surgical days in what had to have been indescribable pain. The last sentence explained that just before death, the leg wound spontaneously split open and discharged “a vast amount of pus.”