Max Brand

Dr. Kildare Goes Home

Warsaw 2020

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 1.–YOU CAN BE DOCTORS

WHEN the head of the hospital, that hard-faced Roman, Doctor Carew, joined himself to their famous diagnostician, Leonard Gillespie, the rest of the staff prepared itself for something important.

As the cortege moved down the hall, the way was led by the wheel-chair of that white-haired old lion, Gillespie, who always looked as if he had just finished one battle and was hurrying to get into another fight.

Carew walked at one side of him and on the other was Doctor Stephen Kildare, whose age and country practice seemed to appear in the cut of his threadbare clothes.

Behind the chair was young Doctor Kildare, carrying a sheaf of charts. Nurse Mary Lamont now hurried ahead to open the door to an infants’ ward.

“Wait a minute,” said Gillespie. “Kildare!”

“Yes, sir,” said young Kildare.

“Back up,” said Gillespie. “I don’t mean you, babyface. I mean somebody of importance. Doctor Kildare,” he went on to the father, “before we go in there to look your experiment in the face, I’m going to tell you that if it runs on as well as it’s started, I intend to publish your results.”

“Publish? Publish?” murmured old Kildare. “No, Gillespie. It’s kind of you but I wouldn’t know what to do with a public appearance. I mean to say–”

“You and your modesty are out of this,” said Gillespie. “In a small way it would make you famous, perhaps; but the main lesson is that country practitioners could benefit the whole world, as well as their patients, now and then, if they’d do what you’ve done: take notes on their work and their results.

“The work of all our doctors every day, with ten minutes to note it down, would be like the rain in the mountains that works its way to the sea, sooner or later–rivers of sound information, Kildare, to sweep filthy disease away and give us a clean world.

“But confound them they won’t take time to make notes...Give me one of your books, Kildare!”

The old country doctor pulled out a small notebook and handed it over. Gillespie thumbed through a few of the crowded pages.

“Heaven help the man who had to read it,” he said, “but just the same this is the sword that will win our battle for us. What started the good habit for you?”

“A bad, tricky memory,” confessed the old man, and laughed a little, ashamed of himself, as they went on into the ward so filled with sun and whiteness, that it glowed like a crystal.

“Here we are with the seedlings,” said Gillespie, looking over the row of bassinets. “How quickly they grow up into trees, Kildare, and blights hit them in the leaf and the branch, until at last they decay at the root and go back to the earth that made ’em.”

“After bearing a little fruit, now and then?” suggested old Kildare.

“That’s where Jimmy gets it, eh?” demanded Gillespie. “That crackpot optimism of his that’s always seeing saints and heroes wrapped up in human hides...What’s the matter with you now, young Doctor Kildare? What are you scowling about? Have I stepped on one of your sore toes? Can’t you take it?”

“It’s that that bothers me,” said Kildare, pointing, and with his head canted a little to the side.

“What’s he talking about?” asked Gillespie.

“It’s the baby crying in the isolation ward next door,” said Nurse Lamont.

It was rather a rhythm to be felt than a sound to be heard.

“I get it now,” said Gillespie. “First time you’ve ever heard a baby crying, young Kildare?”

“I don’t like it,” said Kildare.

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