Listening for Lions

  “It’s a young woman, though it might be some time before she is ready.”

  Miss Lothrop looked shocked. “A young woman? Oh, I hardly think that would be suitable. Even if the mission could reconcile itself to sending a woman doctor, which I doubt, she would have no idea of the rigors of running a hospital in Africa.”

  I remembered Nora’s advice, “give as good as you get,” and took a deep breath. “I hope you will have no trouble accepting a woman physician, for if you do, I could not give you the money for the opening of Tumaini.”

  Miss Lothrop stared at me. “I am not used to having a young girl order the mission about.”

  “I have no wish to order the mission about. I only want to return to Tumaini and open the hospital. I am going to be a doctor.”

  THIRTEEN

  In the autumn of my eighteenth year I walked through the doors of the London School of Medicine for Women. I thought of my father and all he had known, and all the decisions over life and death he had made. I only hoped I would not disappoint him. The school was on Hunter Street, but we students lived in quarters on Handel Street, where we had our own rooms. The Royal Free Hospital where we trained was nearby on Gray’s Inn Road. Years before, the hospital had taken the revolutionary step of opening its doors to women studying to become doctors, the only hospital in London to do so. The hospital, which had started out as barracks for the Light Horse Volunteers, had an imposing entrance on which was carved the British lion. I felt sure the lion was a good omen.

  Every time I went to Gray’s Inn Road, I thought of the day I had escaped the Pritchards to seek out Mr. Grumbloch there and at last to tell him the truth. How little I had guessed that one day I would be reading medicine on that very road.

  My first lecture each morning was anatomy. Our anatomy textbook was nearly too heavy to hold. I was amazed at the body’s many parts. Miss Brose made us memorize all the bits and pieces until I wished we had just been simple amoebas with only a bit of squish to us. Not only did we have to name all the bones of the hand, but she made us put them in a bag and then name them by their feel: lunate, scaphoid, trapezium, capitate, pisiform, and hamate.

  Our instructor was as dry as a paragraph in a text, and we imagined her life had been nothing but hospital, classroom, and a small apartment where she kept a cat. Then one day we began to mutter complaints over a long assignment.

  Miss Brose heard us. “Sit down this minute and be quiet.” We looked at one another, not sure of what was coming. She glared at us and then in a stern voice said, “In 1914 there was a war going on. While you were children, lolling about in gardens and eating your teas, I, along with other women doctors, was sent to the Balkans to care for the Serbian army. We were taking the place of Serbian doctors who had died of typhus because they had to work in filthy hospitals with no beds, no toilets, no food, no water, and no medicine. I walked through open cesspools to get to my patients. The soldiers we treated were covered with lice, and we had to crowd them two to a bed. We were lucky to get three or four hours of sleep at night. Now, would one of you kindly tell me of what you are complaining.”

  Our teachers pushed us relentlessly. They knew from their own experience that when the time came to qualify for our degree, as women we would find it especially difficult. There was a strong bond among us students. We were quick to help one another. The student who was good in chemistry helped the student who was not. We shared our crushes on young doctors at the Royal Hospital and our broken hearts when they ignored us. We took one another’s blood pressure, listened to one another’s hearts, and practiced drawing blood on one another. When we were faced with our first cadaver, smelling partly of formaldehyde and stinking partly of rot, because it had not been well preserved, we all held our noses and plunged in, covering for the students who were in the lavatory throwing up. When we all stood on the balcony of the operating room to watch our first operation, and a bloody one it was, there was the comfort of being together.

  I seemed to be in charge of death. I was the only one who had faced death often and learned to accept it and see beyond it. It was not only the deaths of my parents but all my years at Tumaini, when patients we knew and cared for deeply would die in spite of all we could do for them. Most of the other students were seeing death for the first time. If it was a patient they had cared for, they blamed themselves. I consoled them, reminding them of all the patients they had helped. I told them doctors were not miracle workers, but when a little girl in my ward died of meningitis, only the severe look of the attending doctor made me fight back my own tears.

  We seldom had any leisure. Our days were filled with classes and laboratories and our nights with study. Some of the students joined the choral society and the hardier ones crewed on the rowing eight. In our third year, when we became clerks, we were on the hospital wards twenty hours at a time. On those few days when I had an hour or two, I walked over to the British Museum, which was close by. I wandered through the ancient Greek and Egyptian galleries, but my favorite spot was the manuscript room, with letters written by the kings and queens of England, Henry VIII and poor Anne Boleyn, and Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria. There was a description of the execution of Queen Mary Stuart, and you could see Napoleon’s signature. The most romantic thing was a letter Lord Nelson had started to his mistress, Lady Hamilton, just before the battle of Trafalgar. I thought that room better than a dozen history books.

  On Sundays I went to services at the nearby foundling hospital, which wasn’t a hospital at all but an orphanage for children of mothers unable to care for their babies. There were nearly five hundred children, all dressed in the hospital’s quaint costumes. When the mothers left their children, they often left a memento for the child: a lock of the mother’s hair, an earring, or a lace glove. It would be all the child would have to remember his mother. Always as I listened to the children singing like angels, I would hope that my own mother was looking down and rejoicing that I had escaped an orphanage and found so kind a man to care for me. And I hoped that the kind man, my grandfather, was pleased that I was going to be a doctor.

  One Sunday afternoon I followed the crowds to the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park. As I wandered through the aviary, where birds I had seen flying about freely in Tumaini were shut into cages, I had gloomy thoughts about how I was imprisoned in London and in school. From a distance I heard a sound I had not heard since I had come to England. People must have thought I had lost my mind, for I stood absolutely still, my eyes wide, my mouth open. Lions. I followed the signs to the lion house and stood there staring at the ragged lions pacing back and forth, feeling as strong a passion as they did to escape my imprisonment in the city and return to my home. For a wild moment I thought of unlocking their cages. For weeks I dreamed of the lions. Sometimes they were imprisoned in their cages, and I would awake breathless and shaking, and sometimes they were free and wandering in the bush, and I would sleep on peacefully. I never went back to the zoo.

  The school was near to Gray’s Inn, and once or twice a term Mr. Grumbloch gave me lunch at Simpson’s, where the waiters would roll out a cart on which lay a huge roast of beef. Mr. Grumbloch would inquire of me just what cut and degree of rareness I wished, and then would relay my wishes to the waiter as if the waiter had not heard me. Our meals at school were meager and taken on the run, so I ate every bit of the beef, and afterward a slice of apple tart with a great hunk of Stilton cheese.

  Mr. Grumbloch would gravely tell me how my shares and bonds were doing and assure me that financially I was what he always referred to as “comfortable,” which made me imagine that the bank was filled with pound notes sewn into soft cushions and comforters.

  At first I spent my vacations at Stagsway. Mr. Pernick had kept his promise to put aside a room for me, but now it no longer seemed my home. In my mind and in my heart I was already living in Tumaini. Enthusiastic bird lovers from all over the world had taken over Stagsway. They were out in every kind of weather sloshing about in rubber boots,
binoculars strung around their necks. We all sat at a common table for meals, and I listened to them recite to one another the list of birds they had seen that day. Everyone hoped to find the Hylocichla guttata pritchardi, and in the rare event one was spotted, it was an occasion of great celebration and Grandfather was toasted. I would have been happy to continue my vacations at Stagsway, but on a summer afternoon after my second year Mr. Pernick asked if he might join me for a walk in the New Forest, where I had long ago found the wild pony. Mr. Pernick had lately made me nervous with his kindnesses. He was forever opening doors for me, bringing me cups of tea, and complimenting my dullest dresses.

  It was a lovely summer day, and uncharitably I wished that I were able to enjoy the birdsong and the flowers without Mr. Pernick pausing to draw my attention to the birds and the blooms as if I could not see them for myself. When we were well away from the house, Mr. Pernick paused, and I thought he had come upon some bird he wanted to study. I waited for him to raise his binoculars. Instead, after clearing his throat several times, he said, “I wonder, Miss Pritchard, if you have given any thought to your future.”

  “Yes, Mr. Pernick. You know I plan to go back to Tumaini.”

  “Very commendable, but I was thinking of your personal future.”

  One look at his red face and trembling lower lip and I knew at once what he was about to say. For a desperate second I considered fleeing into the forest and hiding. Anxious to head him off, I quickly said, “Mr. Pernick, I am so busy with my studies, I haven’t any time for thoughts of a personal nature.”

  “I would never discourage you from your dream, Miss Pritchard. For myself, if I could have you for a companion, it would be the achievement of a lifetime to be able to study and live among the birds of Africa.”

  There was no place in my dream of Tumaini for Mr. Pernick, and I told him so in the kindest words I could.

  After that I spent my vacations with Frieda on Gordon Square. Frieda took me to the theater and the ballet and made me spend money on clothes. She had given up her sweeping skirts for skirts that showed her knees. Her long hair was cut in a bob. There were always people about talking of artists I had never heard of, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and books I had no time to read, T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Mrs. Dalloway, by someone called Virginia Woolf, who came once to Frieda’s. Virginia Woolf had wonderful hooded eyes and whispered to me unkind and funny things about all the other guests.

  There were intense arguments about the Russian revolution and a political party in Germany called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Frieda’s friends were as exotic to me as the bird lovers had been. They were all brilliant. They wrote books and painted pictures, and if they ever stopped talking, which I was sure they would never do, they planned to change the world. I would sit in a corner and listen to them by the hour, and then I would go up to my room and my own books with their pictures of bones and muscles, their charts that told how many with a disease might live and how many might die, for I knew it was those books that would lead me back to Tumaini.

  Our senior year we all waited to see in which hospital we would do our residencies. With the exception of the Royal Free Hospital, which had long had a close relationship with our school and where we had done our clerking, most of the hospitals were closed to women. During the war, when medical students were scarce, the hospitals reluctantly threw open their doors. Now many of those doors were once again shut. St. George’s and St. Mary’s hospitals had already gone back to refusing women. I hoped for the Royal Free Hospital, where I had been so happy in my work, but when I received my assignment, I saw that I was going to be at Westminster Hospital. A woman from India, Janaki Kumar, who had been in my class, was also assigned to Westminster. I didn’t know Janaki well. She was older than most of us and kept to herself. Now I told her, “I’m going to ask Miss Brose if she can get me transferred to the Royal Free Hospital. There’s already talk that the Westminster wants to get rid of women residents. Do you want me to put in a word for you?”

  “No, no. I will go where I am sent. It is all the same to me, and I hear very good things about the quality of medicine at Westminster.”

  When I tackled Miss Brose, she only smiled. “We mean you no harm, Rachel. We know exactly what you and Janaki are in for. It was our belief that of all the girls, you two could survive the difficulties. We have all had to be pioneers. When I was at training, I was made to go out of the room when a man was examined below the navel. I persevered. I expect you to do the same.”

  Even the location of the hospital was intimidating, close as it was to the great Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. Janaki and I were the only women among thirty residents. At first we were accepted, for the male residents, like ourselves, were all dreading hospital rounds with the chief of medicine, Dr. Raspton, who was rumored to have a vile temper. We all stood huddled together like a miserable clutch of pullets waiting to be pecked at by the rooster. Dr. Raspton was tall and thin, like a statue whose every spare ounce of clay had been carved away by the sculptor. He had thin pitiless lips, eyes like a hawk’s, and an arrogant manner.

  At once he singled Janaki and me out. “Ah, Miss Pritchard and Miss Kumar, what a pleasure to have two young ladies with us to temper our rudeness. I suppose we can count on you for a few months? No marriage in sight as yet to take you away from a career in medicine, as happens to most women doctors?” The male residents snickered, glad not to be a target of Raspton’s satire.

  “No, Sir,” Janaki said, but I was foolish, and knowing that a common objection to women in medicine was that they would be trained and then leave the profession to marry, I said, “A study has just been done, Sir, of women who have graduated from the London School of Medicine for Women, and the study showed that only two or three of the hundreds of graduates are not practicing.”

  There was absolute silence. I realized at once what I had done. Dr. Raspton glared at me. “I was under the impression that I was to be the teacher,” he said, “but I see that it is not to be. Miss Pritchard, suppose you lead the rounds.”

  I was trembling so I could hardly open my mouth. “I’m very sorry, Dr. Raspton. I didn’t mean to talk out of turn.”

  “Well, let us carry on.” He gave Janaki and me a cunning look. “We don’t want to injure your sensibilities, young women, so if there is anything that you find difficult or embarrassing, you will let us know?”

  “Yes, Sir,” we said. My face was burning, but Janaki appeared unconcerned.

  The last patient on the rounds was a man with jaundice. There could be no question, for he was as yellow as a lemon. The patient’s record was passed around among us students. “Well, Osborn”—Dr. Raspton chose a young resident who looked stunned at being singled out—“give us your diagnosis.”

  Mr. Osborn studied the patient’s record. Stuttering with fear, he replied, “I would say it was the man’s liver.”

  “Would you indeed?” Dr. Raspton looked at the rest of us. “And is there another opinion?”

  From the records I saw the man had chills and fever, headache and nausea. I had seen similar symptoms at Tumaini in patients suffering from the bites of certain kinds of lice. I think I believed I could get back in Dr. Raspton’s good graces by answering his question. Of course I should have known better. “Could it be the bite of some insect, Sir?” I asked. “Perhaps a louse?”

  Dr. Raspton’s hawk’s eyes narrowed. He had his prey in sight. “Well, well, Miss Pritchard, you have managed to make your fellow residents look especially foolish this morning. You are correct, though not quite correct. If you were in Africa, you might find these symptoms caused by lice. In England it is caused by ticks. I hope the men in the class will feel free to come to you for help, since by comparison with you, they appear to be quite stupid.”

  I felt twenty-eight pairs of furious eyes trained on me. After that, any task that might be considered remotely embarrassing to a young woman was left to me by the male residents. Ja
naki was sympathetic. “But Rachel,” she said, “you needn’t have told everything you knew right at the beginning.”

  Not all the doctors were hostile to women. When at the end of the year one of the residents, Edgar Nealthingham, asked the neurologist if it wasn’t true that women’s brains were smaller than men’s, the doctor said, “Yes, Mr. Nealthingham, it is quite true and certainly a puzzle, since Miss Pritchard and Miss Kumar got first-class honors in their London examinations this year while you barely scraped through.”

  The residents would give one another sly looks when I had to complete examinations on male patients, but there was nothing that I had not seen long before at Tumaini. When I had first begun to work in the hospital, my father had said, “God fashioned the human body, Rachel. Every bit of it is God’s work, so there is no need for shame.”

  Janaki was never bothered by the residents’ superior attitude.

  “Don’t they make you angry?” I asked, for I would cheerfully have choked them all.

  “It doesn’t matter to me, Rachel. I have been sent here to learn the newest medicines and techniques and to take them back with me to India. A wealthy family in India is paying for my education here, and it is a great expense for them. There is no need for me to waste my time in useless anger. I have only to think of the women in India who need my help. Until there were women doctors, Indian women in purdah—that is, women who were not allowed to go out in public or to have anything to do with a man outside of their family—could not go to a doctor. No matter how ill they were, their sickness could only be described to another person, who would then describe it to a doctor. The doctor would make a diagnosis, but he would never be allowed to see the patient. Think of a woman dying an agonizing death because no male doctor could touch her. No, let them make fun of us. They are nothing to me.”

  Shamed, after that I kept my head down and my mouth shut. By our last year the early antagonisms were forgotten. We were all comrades. We had been through so much together, we were like people in a lifeboat upon a raging sea. All we cared about was our survival. On the day that I qualified as a physician, and my name was written down on the register, I went to the mission board. I was twenty-three and had received my inheritance. I had already sent a check to the board for the supplies I would need in Tumaini. Now I proudly went there to show off my physician’s license.