Dear and Glorious Physician (25 page)

“You forget that it was he who insisted upon our freedom.”

Calliope shrugged. “Freedom is good for the soul. So you often say, and who am I to disagree with you? Nevertheless, it was gay in the slaves’ quarters of the house of Diodorus. Doubtless, it is now gayer in Rome, or on the estates of the tribune. Who comes to this house but hectoring philosophers and tutors, and not even then at Lucanus’ invitation . Has Lucanus friends among the students? Is there laughter here, and spirited talk of girls and festivities? No! We are not old, but it is like the house of old men.”

Cusa frowned at her formidably, but she tossed her long, light brown tresses and said, “Humph.”

“When we return to Rome in another four weeks, Calliope, you will see your friends again, and you will have your gossips and your gaieties. Diodorus has already secured a position for Lucanus as a medical officer in Rome, with an excellent salary. He will also care for a number of rich private patients, and he will be busy in the sanitoria also. We can then have our own small banquets among our friends. It is not the fault of Lucanus that we see no one here; we are strangers.”

Calliope smirked at him. “With the generous stipend the tribune sends you, and your thrift, we can well buy our own small grove and farm near Rome. Is it necessary for you to become part of the household of Diodorus and tutor his children?”

“You have never heard of gratitude,” said Cusa, severely. He slapped his thigh. “No, if Diodorus does not want us, we must remain with Lucanus in Rome to conduct his household. I am certain he will take a wife there.”

“Hah,” said Calliope, with significance. “I tell you he will never marry. Has he accepted invitations from the families of the students here in Alexandria? No. He lives alone, in that terrible marble silence of his. He thinks only of Rubria; he has never forgotten her. She is a divinity to him. In her name he strips himself of money, and that is unnatural for a Greek, to give what he can to every beggar he sees. Does he not visit the prisons to cure and comfort criminals and slaves? He is a scandal. I am a woman of intuition. He has said nothing yet about that position as medical officer in Rome, and is silent when you mention it. I fear he will refuse — ”

“Do not be a fool!” roared Cusa in wrath. “Lucanus may not be natural or warm, but he is not an imbecile. For what has he been studying?”

“For some fearful reason of his own,” said Calliope.

Satisfied that she had now made Cusa anxious, she retired with her child for the afternoon’s sleep. But Cusa was too disturbed for rest. He walked out on the high terrace, mumbling to himself.

The house was neither large nor small, and was built of white stone, with a pleasant outdoor portico overlooking the sea through simple white columns. Behind the house lay the hot and vehement city of Alexandria, more polyglot even than Antioch, larger and more glaring, and much more corrupt. It seethed, rumbled, shouted, and screamed with innumerable tongues; it was a restless stream of black, dusky, and white faces, and outlandish garbs. The smothering and twisted streets boiled with caravans and camels and horses and chariots and donkeys. The jackals howled all night from the outskirts of the city. The prefect of the city could not be certain how many of his men would return at night to their stations; murder was very frequent. Even the Roman legions here could not always maintain order. Tax-gatherers disappeared when not accompanied by soldiers; their bodies were frequently found in the river or when the tides returned to the vast and brilliant-colored harbor. This was, to Cusa, the one agreeable aspect of the city, which burned as if with internal fires day and night, morning and evening. Prostitutes of all races and colors frequented the narrow and fiery streets at all hours. Every household of any consequence had its own armed guards at the gates, yet robbery was so common that few commented on it. Hot yellow dust surged over the city in such clouds that it made the smoldering skies red at night under the moon and above the torches set in sockets along the walls. Mobs assaulted each other at midnight; there were always bands of young Jews and Egyptians in conflict, cursing and beating each other with clubs, and using glittering knives. The alleys were full of corpses each dawn, evidence of other conflicts between other races also. Though the Romans had established a very adequate sanitary system of sewers emptying into the harbor, the people used the streets as latrines at night, contemptuous of the public booths within a few feet. As a consequence Alexandria stank, even during the brightest and driest of days. In comparison, Antioch was a clean sanitorium. Garlic seemed to be the popular perfume; the cobbled streets were strewn with the offal of both animals and men, despite the armies of slaves who were driven to the task of daily cleaning. It was a dangerous and flaming city, a sweltering and violent city, always clamoring with the sounds of pursuit and fleeing. Epidemics raged through the households; the prisons were always full. Chariots thundered without cessation; one was never far from the rattling and pounding of them.

But the house of Lucanus was in a more or less isolated spot, not far from the university. It was surrounded by steep gardens and a comforting high wall surmounted by sharp iron pikes. Cusa had carefully established in the city the rumor that Lucanus possessed no money, and that the house was Spartan, containing no silver or gold or anything else worth stealing. In consequence, there had been only a dozen attempts at robbery in these past four years.

Cusa cursed the city and his uneasiness as he stood on the colonnade high above the harbor. The sea was the most royal of blues, almost an imperial purple as it simmered under the white-hot sky. Hundreds of ships, small and large, crowded the harbor. Sails, blue and red and white and scarlet and yellow, hung limp from the masts, for there was no wind in that brilliant stillness of noon. No ship moved; it was the hour for sleeping during the intolerable heat. The city was comparatively quiet, for Alexandria, and only the faintest of rumbles came to the ear of Cusa. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his bare arm and panted. That almost imperceptible breeze coming from the glittering sea was damp; Alexandria was tolerable only when a dry hot wind came from the deserts. The ships now swayed sluggishly on the slow and incandescent tide.

The palms in the garden were overlaid by sparkling yellow dusts, as were the parched grass and the languishing trees. It was impossible to combat the heat of Africa with any water, and the fountains were sluggish. Cusa could hear their feeble complaint between him and the sea. The flowers hurt the eye with their too intense colors, and the eye was further hurt by the light from the sky and the purple blaze of the harbor. Nevertheless, Cusa sat down and gave himself up to his troubled thoughts.

Lucanus had never been a merry soul, even when young, except when in the company of the little Rubria or riding madly on the small ass into Antioch with Keptah. He had always been too reserved, too quiet, too contemplative as a child, and his angers, infrequent though they were, had been as cold as ice, and as glacial. Any sunniness, warmth, and love which had been part of his character had been expended on the daughter of Diodorus. He had laughed rarely, and then almost always in her presence.

If Lucanus had been difficult enough in Antioch after Rubria’s death he was sometimes unbearable to Cusa in these past four years. He would fix Cusa with a sardonic eye when the tutor disagreed with him over the tasks brought home from the university. (Cusa felt that he was the equal of any of the teachers there, and it offended him when Lucanus preferred their interpretations to Cusa’s.) He would lead Cusa on, teasing him not with lightness, but with a sort of bitter goading. “You are no Socrates,” Cusa would say to him, secretly wounded, “and I resent these interminable dialogues which lead to nothing, except to make me appear foolish. Is that your intention?” Lucanus would apologize, with genuine regret, but his face would remain gloomy. He is like a man who constantly bites on an abscessed tooth, Cusa would think. When, in the name of all the gods, will he forget that maiden?

Cusa sat and thought about Lucanus, on the colonnade. He shook his head over and over. Despite Calliope’s complaints he had decided not to leave Lucanus unless the young Greek sent him away.

“It is unfortunate, my good Lucanus,” said the master of arts, Rustrumjee, “that you are firmly decided upon being a physician, for you are an artist of formidable merit.” Rustrumjee was a learned man from India; he was also curator of the art museum at the university of Alexandria, and his tastes were universal, exquisite, and perceptive. A small, graceful, and sinuous man, curiously giving an appearance of deformity, he had a dark face and strangely pale eyes and a subtle smile. To Rustrumjee a man who possessed no art, or no appreciation of art, was scarcely a man at all. Like most Indus, art to him was not apart from religion; he had also taught Lucanus Sanskrit. “As a Brahman, I belong to the exclusive caste of priests, and it is our vow to preserve our ancient language.” He looked at Lucanus with dignity for a moment, then picked up two small rectangles of wood on which Lucanus had painted portraits. He delicately frowned.

Lucanus had been asked by his teacher to remain after the other students had left. The young man said, “Master, I am a physician, from my birth. I can conceive of nothing else for me but medicine.”

Rustrumjee nodded, and sighed. “What has been ordained during Karma must be fulfilled. It is probable that this is another aspect of your Karma, the transmigration of your soul, needed to complete the needs of your spirit. I often like to speculate on what sins you committed against your fellow men, during a previous Karma, which now you must expiate in saving them from pain or death.”

Lucanus involuntarily smiled, the austere planes of his face breaking up from their usual rigidity into youthfulness. Then he was somber again. He never argued with Rustrumjee about religion, or engaged in discussion with him about it. He reserved that for Joseph ben Gamliel, who taught religion, who was compassionate, unlike the Indu, who had no real compassion because he believed that man’s earthly fate was ordained before endless rebirth and should not be protested. Yet Rustrumjee would never kill the most obnoxious fly or other insect, for fear of interfering with its own ordained Karma. Man, mosquito, or rat: they were one and the same to the Indu, moving up slowly through painful rebornings into being, and thence into Nirvana, and on the way demanding and receiving no human pity, for what they were they had so formed themselves, without the help or condemnation of the gods, through eons of time, through eons of existences. Lucanus found the vast interlockings of the Brahman’s religion in some way fascinating. It seemed to explain much of the agony of life, its mysterious calamities, its seeming anarchy. What if the diseased wretches in the prisons and in the medical infirmary, suffering from apparently undeserved tortures, were merely expiating former crimes and spiritual malformations? And, in expiating them, were rising to higher conditions of life?

He had discussed this with Joseph ben Gamliel. Then the Jew had said, “No. One has only to consider the illimitable harmony of nature, which is a reflection of God, its precise laws which never deviate, its exactness. God is the Law, and the Law is perfect and immutable. Consider the Ten Commandments, the Law. The fact that when a man breaks the Law he suffers intensely either physically or spiritually, and sometimes both ways, and that in obeying the Law he has peace and love and justice, and that if he has mortal pain he has spiritual sustenance proves without doubt that perfection is not beyond him and is within his reach. Why then continual rebirth? No. The expiation is in a spiritual form, a realm of abeyance where the soul can cleanse and purify itself.”

Lucanus believed Joseph ben Gamliel no more than he believed Rustrumjee, for the simple reason that though he could not reject God as existing he did not believe in the immortality of man. Convinced of both mortal and spiritual death, he was never without the deepest and most terrible anger against God.

Rustrumjee said now, “These portraits. They are the faces of men you have painted in the infirmary or in prison, dying faces. What extraordinarily passionate colors! Almost too vivid, almost too affrighting; they start from the wood. Some would say such coloring is not true reality, but only expressed emotion which comes from your own soul. There is a quality of distortion in the features, too, which does not arise from actuality, but again from your personal emotion. That agony! That huge distress! That phantasmagoria of torment! Those twisted lineaments that stand out so that one feels one can touch them and find them raised, like a boss! The sweat on the foreheads and on the cheeks seems livingly wet, and one expects the beads to roll. The dilated eyes of suffering pulse with blood; it would not surprise me if they should turn upon me in despair and pleading, begging for surcease. The other masters are horrified by your paintings, but I am not. Ah, Lucanus, you belong in Indi, and I feel that in several of your Karmas you have lived there, for only the Indus paint so, and so are an affront to the moderate Greeks, who prefer Olympian beauty and harmony to reality, and prefer to carve statues of their gods and to color them beyond the natural color of men. Yet Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so realistic, it is said, that a number of birds darted into the exhibition room to devour them!”

He looked at Lucanus wistfully. “You are certain you feel no urge to be an artist rather than a physician?”

“No, Master. I am a physician.”

Lucanus went to the infirmary, though, as he had spent two hours there that early morning, he was not compelled to go again today. There, too, was an Indu physician, but he was a Buddhist striving to alleviate torture so that the soul could attend to peaceful contemplation. There was also a Jewish physician, who had the gentlest of hands and the deepest of pity for all that suffered. There was also a Greek and an Egyptian, and even a Roman interested in epidemiology, which was his subject. Lucanus had long observed that in Alexandria the teachers possessed no arrogance about their individual races or creeds or family backgrounds. Not even the Roman ever declared proudly, “I am a Roman!” The humility, the fraternity, the eager exchange of knowledge among the teachers, the acceptance of each other, and their reverence for each other were at first a revelation to the young Greek. They were a brotherhood dedicated to truth and enlightenment. Truth was all, and the imparting of that truth.

They saw Lucanus entering, and greeted him with affectionate smiles, knowing that to him medicine was the divine art, above all other arts, and knowing him dedicated. But only the Jew could understand his fierce personal preoccupation with pain and death. To the others he seemed a student like themselves, academically interested in the aspects of disease and entranced with research for the sake of research alone. To them death was only one of their failures, the final failure, and they would become disinterestedly agog over it and discuss it endlessly. They experimented for the sake of experimentation.

The clean white infirmary held ten beds. Here were brought the hopelessly sick from the prisons or poor quarters of Alexandria, the chronically ill, the desperately afflicted. As all the patients were either slaves or destitute, experimentation upon them was sometimes merciless, and quite often the experiments had no relation to the immediate disease at all. This Lucanus found intolerable and hateful, and again only the Jewish teacher understood. The others kindly laughed at Lucanus. “Is it not justifiable that one man die so that others, multitudes, may live?” they would ask him. To which he would reply, while the Jewish teacher listened in searching silence, “No. One man is as important as a mass, and perhaps even more so.”

This queer attitude did not diminish the affection and respect of the physicians. But when Lucanus would lament over a mortal illness and work until he sweated to relieve its pain and to save the patient, all but the Jew were puzzled. Truth, knowledge, was the object of medicine. Death was the fate of all men, and pain also. “Yes, men must die,” Lucanus would say, bitterly. “But is it not our duty to be most greatly concerned with pain? Even the pain of a slave?”

He would not experiment for the sake of experimentation alone. He treated the disease, for to him as to Keptah the disease was the man. Beyond the infirmary was the mortuary, where bodies of slaves and the abandoned who died in the infirmary or in prisons were dissected. The laws of Egypt, unlike the laws of Greece and Rome, permitted such dissection, for slaves and the poor were regarded as soulless, and Egypt was not particularly obsessed by flesh except when it was royal or aristocratic.

The Indu doctor, and assistants, had taught Lucanus the art of vaccination against smallpox. He permitted himself to be vaccinated over and over, and would vaccinate the patients. “You are inconsistent,” one of his teachers would jeer at him fondly. “No experimentation for you!” “He is not inconsistent,” said the Jew. “He only wishes to help the patient, who may recover from his present disease, to avoid smallpox in the future. But he would never operate on our — victim’s — eye, for instance, when that eye is not diseased, nor would he inject a patient with another disease, medicine, or poison merely to observe the result because the patient cannot resist. He will relieve pain, and give all treatment that he believes will relieve pain or that particular disease, but he will not inflict pain or disease in the name of research.”

The Egyptian master and his assistants were specialists. They treated the eye, the heart, and various organs as apart from the whole body, and Lucanus resisted the idea of specialism. “If the liver be ill,” he would protest, “then the whole man is ill, for its toxins reach the blood, the eye, the heart, the stomach, the intestines, the skin. And so with ulcers, degeneracies, and all other diseases. It is not only the peritoneum which is inflamed; the whole body is inflamed in sympathy. Cancer is a disease of the whole man, not merely that part which is attacked. If a man has arthritis he does not have it solely in the shoulder, the knee, or the ankle or the toes or hands. He has it universally.”

The Egyptian doctors would be amused, except for the Jew, who agreed. And the Jew told Lucanus privately, “The disease is not only the whole man, but also his soul. A sick spirit creates a sick body, or a sick body creates a sick soul. Not only must the flesh and its disease be treated, but the mind also. It is very possible, though not proved, that all diseases, even those epidemic, originate in some secret chamber of the soul.”

The patients were not slaves or the destitute or the criminal to Lucanus. They were man, who must be helped to defeat the inexorable hatred of God for man. Their sufferings tormented him personally; treating a man with heart disease, he would feel thrills of pain in his own heart. The arthritis which twisted and crippled the joints of a sufferer very frequently twinged his own joints. He would actually feel the devouring of cancer in his own sound flesh when treating a cancerous patient. A tumor of the brain in a slave would give him pounding headaches. It was as if a disease sent out invisible filaments from the patient, entangling him in its symptoms and agonies.

The Egyptian teacher and his assistants often used magic in the treatment of their patients in the infirmary. This gave rise to comradely hilarity among the learned Greek and Roman teachers, who had long lost their national beliefs in the worth of amulets or incantations or rites. But the Jewish teacher had told Lucanus, “As the soul is also sick as well as the body, it can be cured quite often with mysteries, and, as the disease of the body may well originate in the mind, that mind can be convinced by thaumaturgy that it is cured, and therefore the body frequently cures itself.”

He added, “These Egyptians are not so wrong as the others believe. You will notice that when you lay your hands tenderly and with a kind of fierce resistance on a patient the Egyptians become exceedingly interested, though the others chaff you. For the Egyptians have discovered, from observation, that you have a mysterious healing power. The others are rationalists, believing solely in potions and surgery. The Greeks, however, you have observed, are not of the Cnidos school, which treated only the diseased organ. They also believe, with us, that the sick man is part of his setting.”

Just now Lucanus was particularly interested in a man who suffered from a baffling disease of the brain. Some of the surgeons suggested a tumor; it was not often that they were given the opportunity of studying a living brain. Lucanus suspected that they did not truly believe the man had a tumor. Now that he had completed his studies and was a physician he could make protests which would not have been permitted in a student. Moreover, the patient was the Jew’s, and after he had listened to Lucanus he would not let his colleagues interfere with their eager saws and burrs and trephines.

The man was a slave, and his master had sent him to prison for a petty theft. Under the law he could have had him executed, and actually he had been condemned to death. The master had been persuaded to send him to prison. Within the last few days the Jewish teacher had purchased the poor creature, and had given him to Lucanus as a patient. “If you cure him, Lucanus, he is yours.” “If I cure him,” Lucanus had replied, “then I will purchase him from you and set him free.” “I then give him to you as a gift, and you shall make him free yourself. For I remember we Jews were slaves in Egypt.”

Lucanus went to the man’s bed at once, and the Egyptian doctors gathered around to watch. The slave’s name was Odilus, and he was of obscure racial origin, like many of the slaves in Egypt. He had a thin aquiline face, deep and flaming dark eyes, a sensitive and eloquent mouth, and a tall emaciated body with restless fine hands and long delicate feet. He was about twenty-two years old. He looked at Lucanus imploringly, and in silence, but his hands lifted a little as if in prayer.

Lucanus pulled a stool to the bedside and regarded the slave with anxious pity. He unrolled a papyrus and again scanned the symptoms of the man. No steady pressing pain, as in tumor. No signs of paralysis — yet. No muddying or darkening of the irises. No failing of any faculties or senses. But the man was in agony. He had great control over himself, but often he screamed in anguish, pressing his hands to his head. His blood pressure was erratic; sometimes his heart would bound and leap, though there was nothing organically wrong with it. Sometimes his whole body would go into spasms. Upon his being given a sedative the spasms would quickly subside, and a look of profound relief would settle on the drowsing face, a look most moving and touching to Lucanus. There were no physical signs of disease in any of his organs; his skin, though frequently livid or blotched and quivering, was healthy. But the pains in his head, he had told Lucanus piteously, were either crushing, bursting, darting, piercing, or burning. They varied in intensity and in form, but they were always there in one aspect or another.

The other teacher-physicians strolled to the bed and watched Lucanus make another of his meticulous examinations. They watched him hold a candle to the man’s eyes and again search the irises. They watched him as he commanded Odilus to lift his hands, his legs, his feet, his head. Lucanus searched for exaggerated or lost reflexes. All was practically normal, but the man twitched on the bed and moaned. He was intelligent, and he could read and write three languages, and had been his master’s secretary.

Lucanus folded his bare arms on his breast and considered the man for some long moments. “What is the pain today?” he asked, absently. Near his shoulder the Jewish teacher hovered, watching closely.

“Oh, Master,” groaned the slave, “today my skull is too tight for my brain! It is about to burst from its cage.”

“Tumor, obviously,” said the Greek master, avidly.

Lucanus shook his head, not looking away from the slave. “He has been here for over a month, and shows no loss of any faculty or sense, no epilepsy, nor is there the slightest sign of even the most minute paralysis or blindness or deafness. Reflexes are only a little exaggerated today. No, it is not a tumor, which is relentlessly progressive in its damage. He has said he has had this condition for a number of years, though in less acuteness. He has no tumor, therefore, either benign or malignant.”

His handsome face bent over the moaning slave, and it was filled with commiseration and tenderness and sympathy. He took one of the slave’s hands, and immediately the moaning ceased, and Odilus searched his face pleadingly. Lucanus said, “I will give him essence of opium, not enough to stupefy him but to ease his pain. Then I will question him. There is something stirring in my mind — ” He paused. “Today his blood pressure is dangerously high.”

“Impending stroke,” suggested one of the young assistants.

“It is possible he will have a stroke,” assented Lucanus. “But not from any tumor and possibly not from any disease of the brain. Or any disease of any other member of his body. Could it be possible that strokes may result, at times, from causes other than organic?” he mused.

The slave was given a tincture of opium, which he swallowed ravenously, knowing the relief that would come to him. Lucanus waited. Minute by minute the moans became fewer, the twitching of the muscles diminished visibly, and the carved lines of agony subsided on the thin and mobile face. Odilus smiled a feeble smile of gratitude and did not look away from the merciful Lucanus. His eyes began to close. “I will sleep,” he murmured.

But Lucanus pressed his hand strongly. “Bear with me, Odilus, so that you may be healed,” he said.