Fighting for Life Read online

  The stores we patronized were all quite handy to the old horse-drawn streetcar that brought us over from the dock where the Mary Powell landed because few if any stores had then crept above Twenty-third Street. The famous Delmonico’s, just above Madison Square, was almost as far north as we ever went on these trips. Many of the names will sound familiar to modern ears, but the locations are changed now. Arnold Constable’s and Lord & Taylor’s were on Broadway near Seventeenth Street; Altman’s at Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street right on the Elevated, where no smart store would dream of being now; McCreery’s on Broadway below Twenty-third Street and Macy’s still at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. Three large department stores of those days are but blessed memories: Simpson, Crawford & Simpson, O’Neill’s, and the famous “Meet me at the Fountain” emporium of Siegel-Cooper. By lunch time we probably got down as far as the old St. Denis Hotel, opposite Grace Church, and a lunch there was something to dream about, even better than the good French cooking they served you at the sit-up counter at Purcell’s across the street.

  Today’s youngsters evidently think that a girl’s life in the nineties must have been unendurably confining, to match those elaborate whalebone-stiffened clothes she wore. But it seems to me that there is not much that today offers which would compensate for the gay and free days of my youth. There were a great many more “don’ts” to observe then than there are now. But there were also plenty of occasions when the “don’ts” grew transparent and started you to wondering what was underneath. There was, for instance, my Aunt Abby who gave me my first acquaintance with skepticism and non-conformity. I could not begin to explain Aunt Abby but I know she was an invaluable part of my education.

  She was my father’s Aunt, one of a large family of old-fashioned Quakers, whose use of plain language always made ordinary English words sound silvery and beautiful. When I first remember her, she was nearly a hundred years old, a tiny old lady in severe Quaker gray with a white ’kerchief about her neck and her bonnet strings tied underneath her chin in a great gray bow. Quakers have a way of being different without anyone’s minding; perhaps I had more of that quality in me than anyone realized. I know that there were two diverse elements in me struggling for expression: the gay, social and ambitious expression of my mother’s personality and the quiet, taciturn and withdrawn calmness of my father’s Quaker upbringing. . . . But to come back to my Aunt Abby. Her particular crotchet was turning day into night, just like Marcel Proust, of all people. She got up and had her breakfast at midnight, ate her dinner when the sun was coming up over the horizon, had her supper at eleven a.m. and then went to bed again at noon. Her son, with whom she lived on a big farm a few miles outside of Poughkeepsie, would never have dreamed of expostulating with her about her strange habits and she lived in one wing of the big house with her own maid to look after her.

  So, if you wanted to see my great-aunt Abby, you had to get up at the crack of dawn in order to finish the long carriage ride out from town before she went to bed. We children were always eager to go for reasons of our own: we knew Aunt Abby’s diabolical and thoroughly enticing secret, and Father and Mother did not. As soon as we arrived, Mother and Uncle James went off about their own concerns and left us children to Aunt Abby’s ministrations. Then the thrilling performance began. Aunt Abby would settle her little self on the big old mahogany-and-haircloth sofa with the sampler on the wall over her head, her feet propped on a mahogany footstool embroidered with a gay parrot, range us in front of her on a haircloth footstool apiece, and call for her Bible. It was a colossal volume which practically smothered her when it was opened across her lap. The remarkable old lady never wore glasses and with her keen eyesight she would read us a Bible story, the most incredible she could find: it might be Jonah and the whale, or the three Israelites in the fiery furnace, or perhaps Daniel in the lions’ den. It must have made a very pretty picture like an old steel engraving out of a child’s book: the old lady, so long past the allotted three score years and ten, reading the Scripture to three curly-headed youngsters. She always read the story with much earnestness and we hung on each word. Then, closing the book, she would look up at us benignly and say:

  “Now, children, that is a very silly story. I am an old, old lady and I want all of you to remember what I am saying. It is a silly story and there is not a word of truth in it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that stories like that are true. . . . Jane! Cookies!” Then we ate the cookies and enjoyed them almost as much as this secret display of thrilling skepticism. When Mother returned, she always heard only that Aunt Abby had been reading us Bible stories. We all continued regularly to go to Sunday school without rebellion, but it was hardly possible for us to take much stock in Jonah and the whale from that time on. It would probably be hard to exaggerate the influence that sort of experience may have on a child, learning so early that it is possible to question the unquestionable. We were thoroughly impressed but, although Aunt Abby never asked us not to, we never told anyone of these shocking adventures. When she died at the age of one hundred and six, we children were the only ones who knew her secret. Everyone else assumed that she died as she had apparently lived, an ardent and absolutely believing Quaker. That was so long ago that it can do no harm to tell about it now. And I am not so sure, as I look back on this, of its effect on each of us. My sister, Mary, became a religious devotee and her complete interest in life was the so-called “High Church” branch of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Perhaps my mind was fertile soil for that seed: I know it was the beginning of my desire to question the right and wrong of all accepted doctrines.

  This all sounds as though life, for me, was a round of good times and active gaieties. Life in my family with so energetic a mother had to be that but there was no lack of formal education. I was extremely fond of the school to which I was sent. My attendance there covered all of my school life except for one year when, for some inexplicable reason, I was sent to another private school which carried out its educational regime under the accepted plan. But I was not altogether happy or contented there, and the following year saw me back in my old environment to stay until my college years. It was a highly unusual school, of a type practically unheard of fifty years ago, although some of its peculiarities have much in common with the most advanced of modern educational methods. The school was the private effort of the Misses Thomas, two extremely large ladies who much resembled the late Elisabeth Marbury, in a lovely, peaceful old house on Academy Street, full of exquisite old furniture and a sense of overwhelming calm which impressed the most rambunctious little girl the moment she entered. Miss Sarah conducted the teaching and Miss “Lib” the housekeeping, for there were six or seven boarders among the thirty-odd pupils. They were both impressive people. Miss Sarah was stern and dignified but “Miss Lib” was known through all Dutchess County for her bubbling sense of humor and her ready wit. Once, for instance, when we were driving with her out into the country, we were being badly bothered by a buggy ahead which was smothering us with dust. Presently someone saw that the driver in the buggy ahead was the local undertaker, which made the situation about as dismal as possible. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Miss Lib, “I’d rather take his dust than have him take mine.” One can still hear stories about Miss Lib, in Poughkeepsie.

  So far as the academic side went, the school itself was strangely modern in its plan of study. There were no graded classes, no marks or reports, no examinations, not even any commencement exercises. When Miss Sarah was satisfied that you knew enough mathematics, Latin, French, English, or the elementary sciences, she told you so and all of the women’s colleges of that time took her certificate of a student’s preparation as sufficient for entrance requirements without a shadow of question. The classes were small and rather informal affairs with only three or four girls in each group, usually held around a table in some upstairs room. You progressed strictly according to your ability to master that particular course. If you had a special piece of work to do, you
took your own time to master it, without urging. The teachers were nearly all college-bred women and the instruction was fine and thorough. Discipline was hardly needed, so beautifully did this pair of fine, shrewd women manage their charges. The most severe punishment meted out was having to stay in school after hours and learn twenty or thirty lines of some famous poem before going home. That took a good deal of time, theoretically, but practically we soon learned what the poems would be—it was always the same one until we could recite it all. So we would learn the poem ahead of time, take half an hour or so during our punishment after school to make it seem plausible and then go free. For years and years after I left home I could still recite Thanatopsis, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and parts of The Idylls of the King.

  I have no idea where the Misses Thomas evolved their plan of conducting a school along these latitudinarian lines, any more than I can conceive how they managed to run it so successfully and smoothly that way. Naturally their curious ideas struck many residents of Poughkeepsie as too queer to be safe and there was a large body of substantial citizenry who insisted upon sending their daughters to the town’s other and more conventional schools. But many of what I believe to have been the more progressive people, Father among them, were heartily in favor of it and I am very glad that his mind was tuned to that decision. It was splendid preparation for a child who would presently have to study on her own. By the time I was sixteen I was prepared to enter any women’s college in the country and in Latin and mathematics could have been eligible for entrance to the Sophomore year.

  There had never been any question about my entering Vassar, which was already as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror. But then things began to happen with devastating swiftness. That was just my private calamity out of a series of calamities which went far toward shattering our family and jarred me out of the life I was apparently destined to lead.

  When I was sixteen my brother died suddenly. He was only thirteen years old but a fine and promising lad and the one boy in a family of girls. Three months later Father died of typhoid. In those days typhoid was the scourge of Poughkeepsie and no wonder, since the town water supply was drawn from the Hudson just below the outlet of the sewer from the large Asylum for the Insane above the town. The epidemic of typhoid that winter had one good effect: it resulted in the installation of the first American filtration plant for a town’s water supply. Father’s typhoid was serious enough, but we all knew it was rather a lack of will to live that killed him. My brother’s death had taken all the zest for life from him. We were an understanding trio—my father, my brother, and myself—and when they died so close together there seemed very little left to live for.

  Perhaps it was just as well that financial troubles appeared so soon after Father’s funeral to make us all think of something else. We had always had a comfortable home and enough money, and Father had saved too. But when the estate came to be settled, a recent series of losses and bad investments told the inevitable story of practically nothing left. It was immediately evident that somebody would have to get ready to earn a living for all three of us—my mother, my sister, who had always been delicate and a semi-invalid, and myself. I considered myself elected. It was a hard struggle to give up Vassar but there was not enough money left to pay for that and for any additional preparation for a professional life. I had long talks with Dr. Taylor who was then President of Vassar, and with Professor Leach who was determined that I should follow my original plan. A scholarship was ready for me but time loomed large when I thought of nine or ten years of study. I made my own decision, after months of agonizing debate, and in the end it was decided that Mother and Mary should live at home and I should take five thousand of the few precious dollars remaining, go to New York and study to be a doctor.

  CHAPTER II

  I WISH I COULD REMEMBER WHAT MADE ME choose medicine as a way of earning my living—for that is the conscious commercial attitude I had toward it at that time. I expect that even then I did not know my motive very clearly. Many years afterward, a newspaper reporter interviewed me for hours in an effort to get a story which would give some definite starting point to my career. He did not do so badly after all, for the completed article when published filled three columns of newspaper space. His conclusion was that an injury to my knee, which kept me on crutches for over two years, had developed in me a tremendous respect for the profession of medicine and a not-to-be-denied yearning for a medical education. To be exact he wrote: “If little Josephine Baker had not hurt her knee, 90,000 babies now alive would have died.” I have the utmost respect for the Fourth Estate and in my years of Health Department work learned to know intimately many of those splendid fellows—of both sexes—and I know what “copy” means to a reporter. But I have a profound conviction that he was wrong. I did have a deep affection for the doctors who took care of me during that time. They were father and son, “old” Dr. Lewis Sayre and his son Dr. Lewis H. Sayre. The old doctor was New York’s most celebrated orthopedist. He was the stiffest, most fiercely starched, the sternest and most likable martinet who ever practiced medicine. His older son was a gentle edition of his father. With the third son, Dr. Reginald Sayre, they formed an unforgettable trio in the best of the old medical tradition. But no one could have been more acid or more profoundly skeptical of women doctors than old Dr. Sayre was. When I once diffidently mentioned to him that I was thinking of studying medicine, the atmosphere was sulphuric with his comments. He ruthlessly discouraged me as did our own family physician Dr. John Kinkead. But later Dr. Kinkead, for whom I had a great admiration and affection, was a loyal, devoted friend who helped me over many bad places.

  It was strange. I had known only one woman doctor at all well—Dr. Kate Jackson. I had barely heard that there were such people but was quite aware that the world did not wholly approve of them. I was to be in no sense a pioneer in the study and practice of medicine. But in my sheltered life medical women were such rare and unusual creatures that they could hardly be said to exist at all. There was no medical tradition on either side of my family. There were lawyers but no doctors. And both sides of the family were aghast at the idea of my spending so much money in such an unconventional way. It was an unheard of, a harebrained and unwomanly scheme. At first my mother too was rather overwhelmed at the idea, but she trusted me and she made a gallant surrender. “If you really think you should, Jo,” she said, “go ahead. I’ll try not to fret too much about it.” Besides she had been through this sort of perplexity herself; it had taken a good deal of courage and determination to uproot oneself from a little town and experiment with a newly-founded women’s college in 1861.

  My only explanation of the mental process that led me to my decision is that the study of medicine did occur to me, rather casually, from my long association with the Doctors Sayre, and that later, when I encountered only argument and disapproval, my native stubbornness made me decide to study medicine at all costs and in spite of everyone. That is, after all, hardly a rational way to choose one’s life work and yet, in a curious way, it seems to hold the secret of whatever success may come to one in later life. I am thoroughly convinced that obstacles to be overcome and disapproval to be lived down are strong motive forces. Years afterward, when I came into intimate contact with what has been called “the submerged tenth,” I knew that this was true. The children of the rich and well-to-do with the way made easy for them have a hard and difficult road to travel; the children of the poor and underprivileged, battling against disabilities all their young lives, not only have a great incentive but are so used to hardships and discouragements that the future way may seem almost unbelievably easy. Everyone can see innumerable examples of the handicap of wealth and the stimulus of poverty. In my case the need of some such future outlet was imperative. My choice of medicine as a career turned out rather better than I deserved, for I was to learn that this profession demands not only stubbornness but a devotion so wholehearted that it amounts to absolute consecration.

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bsp; For a great many years while I was with the New York City Health Department, there used to come into my office each spring a long line of young men and women each with the same question to ask: “Do you advise me to study medicine? I want to do something with my life and medicine seems a good career. I can’t make up my mind about it and the preparation seems long and difficult. So I thought I would ask your advice about it.” There is just one answer to that question and there never can be more than one answer. It is a final and emphatic “NO.” There is something about the practice, and the study, of medicine that takes all of one’s devotion, all of one’s interest and, in most instances, all of one’s life. I used to tell these doubtful young people just that. And the advice is as true today as it always has been. “If,” I would say, “you are prepared to study medicine and determined to do it against all the advice of your friends and your family, if you are ready to go through with it even to the point of being disinherited, and if your decision is so definitely made that there can be no other course for you, then you wouldn’t come to me with this question. The very fact that you are asking me to decide for you shows me that medicine is not for you nor you for medicine. You may study and become an average doctor but medicine, like the ministry, is a jealous mistress. Determination, courage, and a love of your fellow-man are its keynotes and nothing less will answer.”