Free The Healing Season by Ruth Axtell Morren Page A

read the latest medical journal. As soon as he’d finished, he turned eagerly to the package that had been delivered in the mail. It was postmarked France.
    He still corresponded with a doctor he’d met at La Charité, one of the largest, most successfully run hospitals on the Continent if not the entire world. He clipped the strings of the oblong box and slit the wrappings with a penknife. He opened the box and drew away the wadded-up tissue paper. Carefully he took out the long cylindrical instrument, which resembled a flute. He turned it over in his hands, studying it curiously. Could it be a musical instrument?
    After examining it a few moments, he dug around the box and found a letter. In it, his friend described an exciting new invention by the great physician Laennec. Ian had met him in Paris and observed his care and skill with the wounded French soldiers at Salpetriere Hospital.
    The instrument was to aid in “auscultation,” a term created by the physician to describe the process of interpreting the sounds emanating from the body cavities, especially the lungs. Laennec called the new instrument the stethoscope, an “observer of the chest.”
    Ian held up the instrument with a new sense of awe. He placed it to his ear as his friend described. How he wished he had a patient with him at that moment. His gaze fell on Plato, who was curled up on his desk, breathing in and out rhythmically.
    Ian placed the other end of the long tube, which his friend said the French were calling le baton, at Plato’s chest. The cat stirred and stretched. This gave Ian better access to his chest cavity.
    Sure enough, the sounds of heartbeat and breath became magnified, greater than Ian had ever imagined from the current method of putting one’s ear to a patient’s chest, which respect for modesty many times prevented.
    His thoughts raced ahead, imagining the possibilities between the relatively new technique of percussion—tapping one’s fingertips against a patient’s chest wall—and now this incredible little baton-shaped object that could increase the interior sounds of a human body.
    He reread his colleague’s letter. Nothing had yet been published on the stethoscope. Laennec hadn’t even given any public lectures. But those who worked withhim were amazed at the range of diagnostics available with the use of the baton. He described the differences being distinguished in the various diseases of the chest. The lungs of a consumptive had their own distinctive sounds, those of a pneumonic another.
    Ian placed the instrument carefully back in its wrappings. Tomorrow he would take it with him on his rounds after surgery.
    After he’d cleared off his desk, he headed to the other side of his study and lit the lamps in that area.
    Sitting down at his microscope, he began examining the different cultures he’d brought home with him from the dispensary.
    Gangrenous matter, ulcerous tissue, a rotted tooth, a slice of a tumor he had cut out and preserved in alcohol. He stared at the tiny orbs moving about under the lens, the different striations, the tiny world brought to visibility under the specially ground lens. He stared fascinated, carefully describing each sample in the notebook at his side.
    How did the tissues form abnormalities, the illness attack the healthy organs? These questions challenged the best physicians and surgeons of his day. He compared the healthy tissue to the diseased; he read every journal with the discoveries of his colleagues across the Channel. He thought back to the years he’d spent in France, visiting the large teaching hospitals, studying the effect of spacious wards and good ventilation.
    He compared the diseases of the poor in the City with those of the wealthy.
    He could only come to one conclusion. The filth and squalor of the living conditions of the poor contributed much to their illnesses and mortality rates.
    As the clock struck midnight, Ian finally rose and stretched, realizing how little