The New Confessions Read Online Free PDF

away from home almost all week. At weekends he often returned to thewards for a few hours to see how his patients were progressing. He kept a journal—a professional journal—and wrote up his observations every night.
    He was always experimenting with new techniques of treatment, and these experiments were the only thing that formed a bond between us. It all started when I was about ten. One evening he came into my bedroom, a rare event.
    “Johnny,” he said stiffly, “would you like to help me with something?”
    I could hardly say no.
    “This weekend, would you do me a favor? Eat nothing but apples and drink nothing but water.… I’ll give you half a crown.”
    He explained what he was on about. He was alarmed at how many of his patients died after surgery. He felt sure that the key to their survival lay in the purification of their diet. A “complete cleansing of the system” was his aim. You have to give him some credit. Working in the days before sulfanilamides, penicillin and our modern antibiotics, and in the earliest days of sterilization, he had come across something that later generations would endorse. But he was working in the dark.
    “It’s the sepsis, you see, Johnny, I’m sure. Somehow we’ve got to keep the system unadulterated.”
    He had been most distressed by a recent case, a little girl who had pricked her finger on a rose thorn. The tiny puncture had become inflamed; poultices had been applied but to no avail. When she was brought in to see Father her finger—middle right—was swollen twice its size and a nasty plum color. Father was a follower of Pasteur and Lister. Scrupulous cleanliness was his watchword. Over the next few weeks, in such an environment, he first lanced the finger, relanced it, amputated it, then removed the girl’s hand, then her arm up to her elbow. He was contemplating whether to take her arm off up to the shoulder when she died.
    “And all because she pricked her finger on a thorn. A tiny thorn …” There was a look of stunned incomprehension in his eyes as he told me this story. It was a real affront, cruelly illustrating his basic powerlessness, and questioning his calling as healer. Hence this new obsession and my role in it as guinea pig.
    At first I was happy to comply. He had never taken such a close interest in me. I ate apples and drank water all weekend. My pulse and blood pressure were taken hourly, my urine analyzed and my stool examined.
    “How do you feel?” he asked on Sunday night.
    “Fine.”
    “Any different from normal? Do you maybe feel a wee bit better than you did on Friday?”
    I looked at him. His pale, clear blue eyes. Dad, I said to myself, I want to help.
    “Yeeees …” I drew it out. “I think I do feel a wee bit better.”
    “Good lad. There’s your half crown.”
    And so, once every two or three months I would be called on to help with the great system-cleansing experiment. There was the bread and milk diet. The root vegetable diet. The meat diet. The salted-fish diet. I went on a week-long rice pudding diet—rice pudding for breakfast, lunch and supper—during the holidays, which earned me a guinea.
    “How do you feel? Bit more strength?”
    “I think I do … I feel … I feel a bit more lively.”
    “Grand! Well done, Johnny, there’s your quid.”
    During my regime I would let myself out surreptitiously and wander round to the Grassmarket and buy a couple of sticky buns from the baker. I felt no guilt. It made Father happy and it distracted him from my case, as it were, for a time. I feel very sorry now for those patients—the frail amputees, the feeble inmates of the isolation wards—upon whom I conferred the added discomforts of thrice-daily boiled turnips or constant salted fish as they struggled fitfully to convalesce.
    By some standards I must have been quite a lonely child. Periodically, my father made an effort to integrate me into the social lives of his colleagues’ families, but none of the