The Final Diagnosis Read Online Free PDF Page B

do. But the start was good; that much was reassuring, and he knew that his decision on the airplane three and a half years earlier had been right.
    There were soft spots, of course, in the present setup. There had to be. Nothing this big was achieved easily or quickly. Some of the seniors on medical staff still fought off changes, and their influence was strong among the older members of the board, some of whom still remained—Eustace Swayne, as obstinate as ever, at their head. Perhaps this was a good thing, O’Donnell reflected, and perhaps there was justice sometimes in the assertion that “young men make too many changes too quickly.” But because of this group and its influence there were occasions when planning had to be tempered with prudence. O’Donnell accepted this fact himself but sometimes had difficulty in getting it across to the newer staff members.
    It was just this situation which had made him thoughtful after talking with Bill Rufus. The pathology department at Three Counties was still a stronghold of the old regime. Dr. Joseph Pearson, who ran it like a personal possession, had been thirty-two years at the hospital. He knew most of the old board members intimately and was a frequent chess companion of Eustace Swayne. More to the point, Joe Pearson was no incompetent; his record was good. In his earlier days he had been recognized as an active researcher, and he was a past president of the State Pathology Association. The real problem was that the work in Pathology had become too much for one man to keep the reins in his own hands. O’Donnell suspected, too, that some of the pathology department’s lab procedures were in need of overhauling. But desirable as changes might be, this one was going to be tough.
    There was the drive for funds for the hospital extension to be considered. If there were trouble between O’Donnell and Joe Pearson, how would Pearson’s influence with Eustace Swayne affect Orden Brown’s plans for raising all the money by fall next year? Swayne’s own donation would normally be a big one, and loss of that alone could be serious. But equally serious was Swayne’s influence with other people in the town; in some ways the old tycoon possessed the power to make or mar their immediate plans.
    With so many things pending O’Donnell had hoped the problem of Pathology could be left for a while. Nevertheless he had to take some action, and soon, about Bill Rufus’ complaint.
    He turned away from the plans. “Harry,” he said to the administrator, “I think we may have to go to war with Joe Pearson.”
     
    Three
     
    In contrast with the heat and activity of the floors above, in the white-tiled corridor of the hospital’s basement it was quiet and cool. Nor was the quietness disturbed by a small procession—Nurse Penfield, and alongside her a stretcher gliding silently on ball-bearing casters and propelled by a male orderly wearing rubber-soled shoes below his hospital whites.
    How many times had she made this journey, Nurse Penfield speculated, glancing down at the shrouded figure on the stretcher. Probably fifty times in the past eleven years. Perhaps more, because it was not something you kept score of—this final journey between the ward and the hospital’s morgue, between the territory of the living and the dead.
    A tradition, this last walk with a patient who had died, discreetly timed and routed through back corridors of the hospital, then downward in the freight elevator, so that the living should take no darkness or depression from death so close at hand. It was the last service from nurse to her charge, an acknowledgment that, though medicine had failed, it would not dismiss the patient summarily; the motions of care, service, healing, would continue for at least a token time beyond the end.
    The white corridor forked two ways here. From a passage to the right came the hum of machinery. Down there were the hospital’s mechanical departments—heating plant,