Free The Anatomy of Deception by Lawrence Goldstone

Then he smiled and clapped his hands together. “But that brings us to you. If I accept the offer, I would like you to come with me to Baltimore as Assistant Head of Clinical Medicine. The position would apply not just to the hospital, but eventually to the medical school as well. Initially, you will receive two thousand dollars per annum, although I’m certain that you can at least double that with private patients.”
    I stared at the Professor, feeling my lower jaw moving but with no sound emerging. Finally, I managed, “Dr. Osler … I … am …” No more words came.
    The Professor laughed, one loud cannon shot. “Well, Carroll, I believe I have for once struck you dumb. You look quite exceptional. Well, you’ve earned it. I knew you were a special sort the first day I saw you at rounds two years ago, and nothing has since persuaded me otherwise. You are professional, thorough, curious, and a fine doctor. As to your age, I suppose you know that for my first teaching assignment, I was younger than you are now.”
    I did know. At McGill University in Canada, Dr. Osler hadbeen granted a teaching position at twenty-three. His students dubbed him “The Baby Professor.”
    “And besides,” he went on, “children of the backwoods such as ourselves need to stick together, eh?”
    Although the Professor enjoyed stressing the bond of our rural upbringings, he was hardly a rustic. The Osler family had eventually settled in a wilderness town in northern Canada, it was true, but the Professor’s father, Featherstone Lake Osler, had been the original choice to sail on the
Beagle
as ship’s naturalist, a post that went to Charles Darwin only when the elder Osler declined. Though the Professor’s father had then entered the ministry and been posted to Bond Head, Ontario, William Osler had been surrounded by books and learning during his entire childhood.
    My boyhood, by contrast, had been dominated by a decidedly different set of stimuli. The fetid smell of our farmhouse still lingered in my nostrils, unwashed bodies mixed with the waft of cheap stew and even cheaper liquor. Yelling, tears, and the soft moans of my mother were never far away. I would continue to send money home so long as I was able, but I had not and would not return to Marietta. With four thousand dollars per year, I could finally make certain that no one in my family could have further cause to accuse me of ingratitude.
    “Still,” he continued somberly, “it will be difficult to leave … I have made so many friends.” Then he brightened once more. “But as much as I prize my colleagues here, the Hopkins staff will be truly extraordinary. Welch, as you may know, will be running the show … brilliant pathologist. Lafleur, whom I taught in Canada, will arrive shortly. Halsted is already there.”
    “Halsted?” I asked.
    The Professor’s face turned dark, an instantaneous eclipse. “And why not Halsted?” he bristled. “He is the finest surgeon in America, probably the world.”
    I was stunned by the Professor’s change in demeanor atmy query. “Why, yes, Dr. Osler,” I sputtered, “I’m sure you are correct, but I thought that he …”
    “Yes, I know what you thought,” the Professor replied. “‘Drug addict.’ You and everyone else.”
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “Of course you didn’t,” he snapped, though his irritation seemed directed no longer at me, but to an audience not present. “Halsted has been unfairly maligned for the better part of a decade. To think that a man of his genius has been reduced to … Well, it’s not important now. Do you know that at this moment, he is perfecting a new surgical suture that will be largely subcutaneous and cause almost no tissue trauma and minimal scarring?”
    Before I could respond, the Professor continued, more willing to expound on the prejudices foisted on a colleague than those foisted on him. “Halsted has pioneered one brilliant surgical advance after another. Just months