A great many doctors come to visit the hospital. Sometimes the young
students from the city hospital, then the aristocratic and famous
surgeons who operate on desperate cases, specialists, all grades and
classes of physicians, enter accompanied by the little doctor who lives
upstairs on the top floor. His name is B. Davidson. He is so small that
he seems almost a schoolboy; his eye-glasses are the only elderly thing
about him. But he is very efficient, scrupulous and--a marvelous thing
in prison--humane in his treatment of the convicts.
The warden and the keepers hamper him continually in his work, as he
will not listen to their opinion about convicts who, according to them,
are all fakers. They have the temerity to place their ignorance, and
their hatred of the prisoners, against the professional knowledge and
humanity of the doctor.
The boy who had a tumor on his back was kept a week locked in a cell,
and was not allowed to see a doctor, because the keeper claimed that he
was faking. The doctor laughed when he related the story. "Imagine
anybody faking a tumor the size of a cocoanut!"
In the opinion of most prison keepers, every man who reports on the sick
list is an incipient faker. The sick man has to inform his own keeper
and he is then reported to the head keeper. Should they diagnose the
case as a fake, then the prisoner is shoved back gently to the line; but
should the convict in spite of their verdict insist that he is sick, he
is locked up in a cell to get well without a doctor, or to rot in it,
until even the doctor's help is of no avail.
Most cases of consumption, paralysis, insanity, or any internal
disorder, are considered fake cases. Only when a man breaks a limb or
splits his head open, or when some disease "breaks out" on him, is he
believed to be sincere.
The sturdy young sailor who had worked at my side in the tailor shop was
brought to the hospital. He was so changed that I hardly recognized him.
I had to ask him his name, and if he remembered having worked in the
same shop with me, before I became convinced that he was the same man.
They kept him locked up in a cell a whole week before the doctor was
permitted to visit him, and then they discovered that he was suffering
from typhoid fever. Meanwhile he had been eating food from tin plates
which were washed in the kitchen.
A convict who was in perfect agony from neuralgia of the teeth was
visited twice. As no cavity could be discovered, they punished him by
extracting forcibly three perfectly healthy teeth from his jaw.
This incident was related as a great joke by a young assistant to a
doctor, to two companions who were preparing a patient for an operation.
A pair of prison-made shoes, with a nail sticking up inside the heel,
was forced on a new-comer by the head keeper. When he protested, he was
abused, insulted and threatened with punishment if he did not put on
that particular pair of shoes. For two days the unfortunate man hobbled
about, working in the kitchen, trying as best he could to ease the
intense pain on his heel inflicted by a rusty nail. His foot began
swelling and, made desperate by the pain, he finally refused to work
until he had seen a doctor. When the doctor examined him, he discovered
that he was suffering from blood poisoning of the foot, and he had to
be kept over two months in the hospital.
A boy was discovered, by accident, working in the bakery suffering from
a loathsome venereal disease.
The young doctor could not stand the persecution of the system, and he
left in disgust.
The new doctor is a sallow-faced, green-eyed individual, evidently a
dope fiend. He leaves morphine hypodermic syringes lying all over the
place; and any one who wants an injection can have it for the asking.
Luckily for us, he did not stay very long.
One night we were kept awake by heart-rending, piercing howls, which
came from the apartment occupied by the doctor on the top floor. He had,
as we found out later, taken an overdose of morphine.
Next day he appeared in the hospital, staggering sideways, breathing
heavily and with a hollow sound, like a damaged bellows. His body shook
as if with the palsy, his hands trembled as they groped for support;
and all the while he was moaning, whining, grunting. He fell into a
sitting posture on the floor, and began catching imaginary flies on his
sleeves.
We had to carry him upstairs and put him to bed. He went away the next
day.
The doctor who succeeded him is a young man who seems sympathetic and
efficient, but he has to keep his job, and so he takes orders from the
consulting keepers, who diagnose cases before he is allowed to see them
or to send them to the hospital.