Medical History

WHEN I was a child, I found it embarrassing to be asked by other children, Who is your doctor?’ Because we did n’t have a doctor, and I knew even then that it was not respectable to be ill without benefit of professional attention.

The medical history of our family was rather odd. It all went back to Grandmother, who thought that ill health was unattractive, not to say disgraceful. Your health, she said, is of no possible interest to anyone but yourself, and when people ask, ‘How are you?’ the last thing they expect or wish is to be told. People who were engaged in building themselves up filled her with a disgust only secondary to the repulsion she felt for people who described their unpleasing symptoms, and people who took medicine in the dining room were not invited to her house, nor would she go to theirs. Her descendants, under her influence, fell into two general schools of thought; about half of them were stoics, never admitting to a disease until they fell dowm under it, and the other half were thwarted hypochondriacs.

Father belonged to the latter group; if he had not been so horribly afraid of doctors, he would have been constantly in their hands. His case was pitiful. Suffering from a thousand imaginary complaints, unable to talk about them because his mother said it was all so uninteresting, and afraid to avail himself of expert advice, he made matters worse for himself by marrying Mother, whose father and three brothers were surgeons and who had that distrust of the medical profession which a woman must feel when sharp knives have been placed in the hands of four of her irresponsible male relatives. She had seen too much of these men of science and heard too much of their light-hearted experimentation to feel any confidence in their ministrations.

So we survived our childish diseases without professional care, and consequently our attitude toward illness, being neither scientific nor conventionally humanitarian, was natural in an unpleasing degree. We did not actually turn against whichever member of the family was suffering, as a herd will turn on a sick cow and gore her to death, but anyone who was ill became aware of an unpleasant and hostile atmosphere. I never cared for the light in the eye of my next of kin when I was lying helpless in bed. Mother was not actually unkind to us when we were sick, but she had been through a good deal with Father’s hypochondria and had no intention of encouraging it in her offspring. She did not, for instance, try to tempt our failing appetites. She would stand in the doorway as far away from the sickbed as possible and inquire if we wanted anything for lunch. If, in the wan hope that sweetbreads or a wine jelly would be suggested, we replied that we were not very hungry and certainly did not want a poached egg, she would nod acquiescently and fade quietly away. In due time no luncheon tray would arrive, and if we wanted anything for dinner we had to come right out and ask for it.

Consequently, whatever form our flights from reality may have taken, illness was not one of them. Illness was not a way to attract any desirable sort of attention in our family. It was taken for granted that we got sick to be annoying, and in any case we were probably putting it on, and if we were really sick we undoubtedly had something loathsome and communicable. If we wandered around the house for several days, pale and listless and refusing food, someone would finally inquire in an accusing voice, ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?’ When we admitted that our ears rang and our legs ached and we had a queer pain here, our solicitous relative would remark acidly that in that case we had better stay in our own room — and not act that way around decent people, was the inference. If we persisted in our folly, Mother would say one day, ‘If you are n’t better tomorrow, I shall send for a doctor.’ She said this not to be helpful, but out of pure meanness; she knew that, like our craven father, we were terrified at the idea of a doctor, and she was very contemptuous of our fears; she did not believe that doctors were intrinsically dangerous so long as one failed to follow their advice. We were usually better the nest day, cured by the threat, or by Nature (of whom more later), or by one of the remedies Mother got out of her book.

It was a very thick book bound in calf, which mother used to consult when we came out in spots. It had been prepared for missionaries in the field and it dealt handsomely with all the ills the flesh is heir to. It was so horribly illustrated with pictures of the human interior that we used to alarm ourselves with it on rainy afternoons; it was more shocking in a way than the Bible illustrated by Doré, because the plates were colored and in sections that stood up separately, disclosing veinous horrors one beneath the other, rather like that modern divertissement for juveniles, the Pop-up Books, except in subject matter. Our knowledge of pathology was consequently enormous and very inappropriate to our age, and it would have disturbed Mother if she had realized that we were going the way of our poor father and accumulating lore from which to manufacture imaginary complaints.

He was the only member of the family who worried about our childish illnesses, and he used to bring home cartons of patent medicines recommended to him by some enterprising drug-store clerk, which Mother would not permit him or us to use. This was the most desirable of the two forms his worry took; its other manifestation was that it made him extremely cross. The more he worried about us the worse he treated us, and it was hard to lie in bed swollen with hives and be scolded for an hour before he went to his office.

When he was worried about his own health he was even more terrible. The two ailments he had selected for himself as being easy to remember and much spoken of were pneumonia and a stroke, and when he went about for days pale, speechless, and scowling, we knew that he believed himself to be harboring one or another of these lethal complaints. He always had his strokes and pneumonia fully dressed in the living room, because he believed that if he went to bed he would die. I think Mother used to be sorry for him in a detached way, because once, to put the poor fool out of his misery, she secretly summoned a doctor, instructing him to tell her husband that he had a slight touch of lumbago from working too hard in the garden (which was, indeed, the only genuine illness he ever had), but the doctor was not permitted to examine the patient, and was treated with such extreme rudeness that he left abruptly, assuring us he would never come back no matter what disaster befell us. To Father’s secret regret, I am sure; because in a way the most fun he ever had was when at a rather advanced age he had to part with a tooth.

We had endured his frightful behavior while he was suffering, as usual, on the hearthrug in the living room as long as we could; until finally Mother made an appointment for him with a dentist who was experienced in handling difficult children. Once the tooth was out (and he confessed that they had to give him novocaine to get him into the dentist’s office), his reserves broke under the nervous shock and he told the dentist all about the functional disorders from which he had suffered in secret for so many years. The dentist marveled at his delicate health and uncomplaining courage, and assured him that he would probably pick up now that the tooth was removed. It was one of the biggest teeth he had ever seen, he said admiringly, and Father had been quite brave about it compared with a famous football player who always cried in the chair. Father thought the dentist was a very sound man and would have liked to go back to him if he could ever have mustered up the courage.

It all went to show that Father and the medical profession might have been associated for years with mutual pleasure and benefit if he had not been driven by his wife’s prejudices and his abject fears from the outlet of laying his little troubles periodically at the feet of some wise and kind physician. As it was, he was driven to a belief in the beneficence of Nature. He adopted a tag from Pope to the effect that ‘Whatever is, is right,’ and, as his children began to show signs that they would live to grow up, he stopped worrying and became very philosophical about the sufferings of others. If we had a headache, or an infected finger, that was kind old Mother Nature helping us to get rid of poisons we had accumulated by our unnatural way of life (not subsisting on roots and nuts). There was a very trying period when he anointed himself with the best olive oil and lived on fruit and raw vegetables, but he also lived on whatever was served in the dining room, eating the more natural foods between meals, a diet which soon produced one of his strokes and was abandoned. But he retained his belief in Nature in preference to more conventional therapeutics.

He did not believe in inoculation because he was afraid of being stuck with a needle, and when the school authorities finally cornered us for purposes of vaccination he was convinced, having read Mr. Shaw on the subject, that the most that could be hoped for was that we should lose one limb apiece. He collected anecdotes of the horrible mistakes of doctors, how they sew up needles in their patients and take out the wrong organs and perform irresponsible amputations. He pointed with complacency to Mother’s hay fever, which appeared punctually on August 15 and yielded to no treatment; there, he said, was a simple little thing that any veterinary should beable to deal with, but year after year, in spite of being injected with pollen and sent to distant climes, she went about sneezing and with streaming eyes. If they could n’t cope with hay fever, how could he trust them with his enormously complicated secret diseases? At other times, when he was not using her complaint as a peg on which to hang his dissatisfaction with the medical profession, Father had been heard to remark that hay fever was purely mental. How could Nature’s flowers do any harm to Nature’s other children, such as Mother? It was therefore an imaginary disease, to which people of strong mind were not subject.

There was something very contagious about the attitude of our immediate ancestors toward illness, and in time we all acquired it. I never believed in my sister’s dizzy spells, which occurred so regularly when she had a boring invitation or was asked to render a service; we disbelieved in my brother’s whooping cough to such an extent that an epidemic was traceable to our doors (fortunately for the health of the community, we were fairly immune to contagious diseases), and no one believed in my hives, which were a vernal reality to me. The illnesses of our friends seemed very unreal; we should have been sick, too, if we could have been assured of such cosseting and pampering as they received. We never went to see them in the hospital because the smell of disinfectants frightened us, and we believed that we should be seized and operated upon (ugly phrase) if we entered the doors, over which hung a portrait of our grandfather, which, consequently, we have never seen.

So our conception of the medical profession is colored by the emotional attitudes of our parents; we are afraid of doctors, like Father, and we believe them to be lightminded and untrustworthy, as Mother does. We go to doctors now that we are grown up because we have not the courage to be as queer as our parents, and people look at you so oddly when you are sick and will not have a doctor; but we have never received a very accurate diagnosis of any of our complaints from the specialists we consult because we do not tell them the truth about our symptoms. We have too much sense for that. From our childish research in Mother’s calf-bound book we know where it is inadvisable to have a pain, and we never confess to one in any of these regions.