Memoirs of a Woman Doctor Read Online Free PDF Page A

elbow and the night sister’s voice summoned me to a woman patient’s bedside. I was there in a flash. She was a young married woman. I listened to her heartbeat; the valves had thickened with rheumatism and begun to make discordant noises, unlike the melodies I’d heard before from healthy hearts. The valves had lost their suppleness and could no longer shut the doors of the heart tightly, so that the blood seeped through them with a gurgling noise like that of a rotten water-wheel.
    I looked at the young woman and saw a gleam in her eyes. ‘What shall I call him?’ she asked me. ‘He’s my first child.’
    I gave her an injection, hiding her eyes from my sight behind a veil of anaesthetic, and said, ‘I don’t know. We don’t yet know if it’ll be a boy or a girl.’
    Time passed, terrible moments, and I watched the child’s smooth black head emerge from the darkness into the light, enclosed by the hard metallic jaws of science. I listened to the woman’s heart struggling and groaning, the blood gurgling weakly and the valves thumping away strenuously. Then the child shot out and uttered a loud cry and I beamed in jubilation, taken aback at the sight of this human being opening his tiny eyes on life for the first time and seeing the big wide world.
    The next moment I became aware of a terrible silence like the silence of the tomb. The gurgle of blood and the thumping of the valves had ceased. I looked at the woman; her face was as cold and still as a granite statue and her chest immobile like a wooden box. What had happened to her? A few moments before she’d been talking, moving and breathing. I rushed to use all the resources known to medical science for snatching human life from the claws of death. I injected her veins with solutions and stimulants; forced oxygen up her nose; tried artificial respiration to get her lungs working; stuck a long needle directly into her heart; opened her chest and began to massage her heart to restore life to it; blew into her mouth and slapped her face to try and get a reaction out of her. But nothing worked. Science was impotent. Nothing on earth had the power to raise this little closed eyelid even one more time.
    I turned my attention to the newborn baby, kicking its legs and crying and screaming in the nurse’s arms. Wasn’t it extraordinary that this lump of live flesh had come out of that stiff dead body lying on the cold metal table? I buried my head in my hands and sat down heavily in a nearby chair. Why was science, the tyrannical god to whom I’d made obeisance, incapable of explaining to me how the valves in the heart could be destroyed by the effects of rheumatism? How could a young woman’s heart stop for ever? How could a dying woman give birth to a living child, a tiny spark of life emerge from dead matter? How did the flame of life burn brightly and then go out? Whence does man come and whither does he go?
    The focus of the struggle inside me widened out from masculinity and femininity to embrace humankind as a whole. Human beings appeared to be insignificant creatures in spite of their muscles, their brain cells and the complexity of their arterial and nervous systems. A small microbe, invisible to the naked eye, could be breathed in through the nose and eat away at the cells of the lungs. An unidentifiable virus could strike at random and make the cells of the liver or spleen or any other part of the body multiply at a crazy rate and devour everything around them. A small sticky drop that found its way from the tonsils to the heart could result in paralysis. The jab of a fine needle in the tiniest finger could take away hearing, sight and speech. One random air bubble could infiltrate the bloodstream by accident and the body would become a motionless corpse like a stinking, putrefying dog or horse.
    This arrogant, proud and mighty man, constantly strutting and fretting, thinking and innovating, was supported on earth by a body separated from extinction by