Michael Crichton - A Case of Need

“That’s true.”

“J. D. Randall,” Conway said, “is the arch-prick of the universe. He has money and power and prestige. He can have whatever he wants—even a little Chinaman’s head.”

I said, “But why should he want it?”

Conway laughed. “Brother, where have you been?”

I must have looked puzzled. “Don’t you know about…” He paused, seeing that I did not. Then he very deliberately folded his arms across his chest and said nothing. He stared straight ahead.

“Well?” I said.

“Better ask Art.”

“I’m asking you,” I said.

“Ask Lew Carr,’ Conway said. “Maybe he’ll tell you. I won’t.”

“Well then,” I said, “tell me about Randall.”

“As a surgeon.”

“All right, as a surgeon.”

Conway nodded. “As a surgeon,” he said, “he isn’t worth shit. He’s mediocre. He loses people he shouldn’t lose. Young people. Strong people.”

I nodded.

“And he’s mean as hell. He chews out his residents, puts them through all sorts of crap, keeps them miserable. He has a lot of good young men working under him, and that’s how he controls them. I know; I did two years of thoracic under Randall before I did my cardiac at Houston. I was twenty-nine when I first met Randall, and he was forty-nine. He comes on very strong with his busy manner and his Bond Street suits and his friends with chateaux in France. None of it means he’s a good surgeon, of course, but it carries over. It throws a halo around him. It makes him look good.”

I said nothing. Conway was warming to his subject, raising his voice, moving his strong hands. I didn’t want him to stop.

“The trouble,” Conway said, “is that J. D. is in the old line. He started surgery in the forties and fifties, with Gross and Chartriss and Shackleford and the boys. Surgery was different then; manual skill was important and science didn’t really count. Nobody knew about electrolytes or chemistry, and Randall’s never felt comfortable with it. The new boys are; they’ve been weaned on enzymes and serum sodium. But it’s all a troublesome puzzle to Randall.”

“He has a good reputation,” I said.

“So did John Wilkes Booth,” Conway said. “For a while.”

“Do I sense a professional jealousy?”

“I can cut circles around him with my left hand,” Conway said. “Blindfolded.”

I smiled.

“And hung over,” he added. “On a Sunday.”

“What’s he like personally?”

“A prick. Just a prick. The residents say he walks around with a hammer in his pocket and a half-dozen nails, just in case he sees the opportunity to crucify somebody.”

“He can’t be that unpleasant.”

“No,” Conway admitted. “Not unless he’s in especially good form. Like all of us, he has his off days.”

“You make him sound very grim.”

“No worse than the average bastard,” he said. “You know, the residents say something else, too.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. They say J. D. Randall likes cutting hearts because he never had one of his own.”

NO ENGLISHMAN IN HIS RIGHT MIND would ever go to Boston, particularly in 1630. To embark on a long sea journey to a hostile wilderness took more than courage, more than fortitude—it required desperation and fanaticism. Above all it required a deep and irreconcilable break with English society.

Fortunately, history judges men by their actions, not their motivations. It is for that reason that Bostonians can comfortably think of their ancestors as proponents of democracy and freedom, Revolutionary heroes, liberal artists and writers. It is the city of Adams and Revere, a city that still cherishes the Old North Church and Bunker Hill.

But there is another face to Boston, a darker face, which lies hidden in the pillory, the stocks, the dunking stool, and the witch hunts. Hardly a man now alive can look at these devices of torture for what they are: evidences of obsession, neurosis, and perverse cruelty. They are proofs of a society encircled by fear of sin, damnation, hellfire, disease, and Indians—in roughly that order. A tense, fearful, suspicious society. In short, a society of reactionary religious fanatics.

There is also a geographical factor, for Boston was once a swamp. Some say this accounts for its outstandingly bad weather and uniformly humid climate; others say it is unimportant.

Bostonians are inclined to overlook much of the past. Like a slum kid who makes good, the city has swung far from its origins, and attempted to conceal them. As a colony of common men, it has established an untitled aristocracy to rival the most ancient and rigid of Europe. As a city of religion, it has developed a scientific community unrivaled in the East. It is also strongly narcissistic—a trait it shares with another city of questionable origin, San Francisco.

Unfortunately for both these cities, they can never quite escape their past. San Francisco cannot quite shake off its booming, crude, gold-rush spirit to become a genteel Eastern town. And Boston, no matter how hard it tries, cannot quite elude Puritanism and become English again.

We are all tied to the past, individually and collectively. The past shows through in the very structure of our bones, the distribution of our hair, and the coloring of our skin, as well as the way we walk, stand, eat, dress—and think.

I was reminded of this as I went to meet William Harvey Shattuck Randall, student of medicine.

ANYONE NAMED AFTER WILLIAM HARVEY [29] The English court physician who, in 1628, discovered that blood circulated in a closed loop. to say nothing of William Shattuck, must feel like a damned fool. Like being named after Napoleon or Cary Grant, it places too great a burden on a child, too much of a challenge. Many things in life are difficult to live down, but nothing is more difficult than a name.

George Gall is a perfect example. After medical school, where he suffered through countless jokes and puns, he became a surgeon, specializing in liver and gallbladder disease. It was the worst possible thing he could do with a name like that, but he went into it with a strange, quiet certainty, as if it had all been foreordained. In a sense perhaps it had. Years later, when the jokes began to wear very thin, he wished he could change his name, but that was impossible. [30] A doctor cannot change his name after receiving his M.D. degree without invalidating that degree. This means that there is a great rush in the final weeks of med school among doctors flocking into court to change their names before they receive their diplomas.

I doubted that William Harvey Shattuck Randall would ever change his own name. Though a liability, it was also an asset, particularly if he remained in Boston; besides, he seemed to be bearing up well. He was husky and blond and open-faced in a pleasant way. There was an All-American wholesomeness about him which made his room incongruous and faintly ridiculous.

William Harvey Shattuck Randall lived on the first floor of Sheraton Hall, the medical-school dormitory. Like most rooms in the dorm, his was a single, though rather more spacious than most. Certainly more spacious than the fourth-floor pigeonhole I had occupied when I was a student. The top-floor rooms are cheaper.

They’d changed the paint color since my day. It was dinosaur-egg gray, then; now it was vomit green. But it was still the same old dorm—the same bleak corridors, the same dirty stairs, the same stale odor of sweat socks, textbooks, and hexachlorophene.

Randall had fixed his room up nicely. The decor was antique; the furniture looked as if it had been bought at a Versailles auction. There was a faded, nostalgic splendor about it, with its tattered red velvet and chipped gilded wood.