Arthur Hailey - Strong Medicine

As he looked at her inquiringly, she added, "Lisa was good for you tonight; you were more relaxed than I've seen you in weeks. But you're still troubled. Aren't you?" Surprised, he asked, "It shows that much?" "Darling, we've been married four years.”

He said feelingly, "They've been the best four years of my life.”

While he drank his scotch Andrew studied the Christmas tree and there was a silence while Celia waited. Then he said, "If it was that obvious, why didn't you ask me what was wrong?" "I knew you'd tell me when you were ready.”

Celia sipped a daiquiri she had made for herself.”Do you want to tell me? Now?" "Yes," he said slowly.”Yes, I think I do.”

"My God!" Celia said in a whisper when Andrew had finished.”Oh, my God!" "so you see," he told her, "if I've been less than a barrel of laughs, there's been good reason.”

She came to him, putting her arms around him, her face against his, holding him close.”You poor, poor darling. What a burden you've been carrying. I had no idea. I'm so sorry for you.”

"More to the point-be sorry for Noah.”

"Oh, I am. I really am. But I'm a woman, Andrew, and you're the one who means most to me. I can't, I won't, see you go on this way.,, He said sharply, "Then tell me what to do.”

"I know what to do.”

Celia released herself and turned to face him. "Andrew, you have to share this. You have to tell someone, and not just me.”

"For instance--who?" "Isn't it obvious? Someone at the hospital-someone with authority who can take some action, and help Noah too.” "Celia, I can't. If I did, it would be talked about, brought out in the open... Noah would be disgraced. He'd be removed as chief of medicine, God knows what would happen about his license, and either way it would break him. I cannot, simply cannot, do that.”

"Then what's the alternative?" He said glumly, "I wish I knew.”

"I want to help you," Celia said.”I really do, and I have an idea.”

"I hope it's better than the last one.”

"I'm not sure the last was wrong. But if you won't talk about Noah Townsend specifically, why not talk to someone in the abstract. Sound them out. Discuss the subject generally. Find out how other people at the hospital feel.”

"Do you have anyone in mind?" "Why not the administrator?" "Len Sweeting? I'm not sure.”

Andrew took a turn around the room, considering, then stopped beside the Christmas tree.”Well, at least it's an idea. Thanks. Let me think about it.”

"I trust that you and Celia had a good Christmas," Leonard Sweeting said. "Yes," Andrew assured him, "we did.”

They were in the hospital administrator's office with the door closed. Sweeting was behind his desk, Andrew in a chair facing it. The administrator was a tall, lanky ex-lawyer who might have been a basketball player but instead had the unlikely hobby of pitching horseshoes, at which he had won several championships. He sometimes said the championships had been easier than getting doctors to agree about anything. He had switched from law to hospital work in his twenties and now, in his late forties, seemed to know as much about medicine as many physicians. Andrew had come to know Len Sweeting well since their joint involvement in the Lotromycin incident four years earlier, and on the whole respected him. The administrator had thick, bushy eyebrows which moved up and down like vibrating brushes every time he spoke. They moved now as Sweeting said briskly, "You said you had a problem, Andrew. Something you need advice about.”

"Actually it's a physician friend of mine in Florida who has the problem," Andrew lied.”He's on staff at a hospital down there and has uncovered something he doesn't know how to deal with. My friend asked me to find out how we might handle the same situation here.”

"What kind of situation?" "It has to do with drugs.”

Briefly Andrew sketched out a mythical situation paralleling his own real one, though being careful not to make the comparison too close. As he spoke he was aware of a wariness in Sweeting's eyes, the earlier friendliness evaporating. The administrator's heavy eyebrows merged into a frown. At the end he pointedly stood up. "Andrew, I have enough problems here without taking on one from another hospital. But my advice is to tell your friend to be very, very cautious. That's dangerous ground he's treading on, especially in making an accusation against another doctor. Now, if you'll excuse me...”

He knew. With a flash of intuition Andrew realized that Len Sweeting knew precisely what he had been talking about, and whom. The Florida-friend gambit had not fooled Sweeting for an instant. God knows how, Andrew thought, but he's known for longer than I have. And the administrator wanted no part of it. All he wanted, quite clearly at this moment, was to get Andrew out of his office. Something else. If Sweeting knew, then others in the hospital must know too. Almost certainly that meant fellow physicians, some of them a great deal senior to Andrew. And they were doing nothing either. Andrew stood up to go, feeling naive and foolish. Len Sweeting came with him to the door, his friendliness returned, his arm around the younger man's shoulders. "Sorry to have to hurry you away like this, but I have important visitors due-big donors to hospitals who we hope will give us several million dollars. As you're aware, we really need that kind of money. By the way, your boss will be joining us. Noah is a tremendous help with fund-raising. Seems to know everybody, and everybody likes him. There are times I wonder how this hospital could continue functioning without our Dr. Townsend.”

So there it was. The message, plain and unequivocal: Lay off Noah Townsend. Because of Noah's connections and moneyed friends, he was too valuable to St. Bede's for any scandal to intrude. Let's cover it up, fellas; maybe if we pretend the problem isn't there, it will go away. And of course, if Andrew attempted to repeat what Sweeting had just conveyed to him, the administrator would either deny the conversation had taken place or claim his remarks were misinterpreted. In the end, which was later the same day, Andrew decided he could only do what everyone else was doing-nothing. He resolved, though, that from now on and as best he could, he would watch his senior colleague closely and try to ensure that Noah's medical practice or his patients did not suffer. When Andrew told Celia about the chain of events and what he had decided she looked at him strangely.”It's your decision and I can understand why you made it. All the same, it may be something you'll regret.”

Dr. Vincent Lord, director of research for Felding-Roth Pharmaceuticals, Inc., was a mixed-up--an unkind person might say '.messed-up"- -personality. A scientific colleague had observed wryly, "Vince behaves as if his psyche is whirling in a centrifuge, and he's not sure how it will come out---or how he wants it to.”

That such an assessment should be made at all was in itself paradoxical. At the relatively young age of thirty-six, Dr. Lord had reached a plateau of success which many dream of but few attain. But the fact that it was a plateau, or seemed to be, kept him worrying and wondering about how he got there and whether anything significant lay beyond it. What might also be said of Dr. Lord was that if there had not been disappointments in his life, he would have invented them. Expressed another way: Some of his disappointments were more illusory than real. One of them was that he had not received the respect he believed he deserved from the academic-scientific community, which was snobby about drug company scientists-regarding them generally, though often erroneously, as second-raters. Yet it had been Vincent Lord's own personal, free choice, three years earlier, to move from an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois over to industry and Felding-Roth. However, strongly influencing that choice were Lord's frustration and anger at the time-both directed at the university-the anger persisting even now to the point where it had become a permanent corroding bitterness. Along with the bitterness he sometimes asked himself. Had he been hasty and unwise in leaving academia? Would he have become a more respected international scientist had he stayed where he was, or at least moved to another university somewhere else? The story behind it all went back six years, to 1954. That was when Vincent Lord, a graduate student at U of 1, became "Dr. Lord," with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. The doctorate was a good one. The university's chemistry school at Chainpaign-Urbana was acknowledged as among the finest in the world, and Lord had proved himself a brilliant student. His appearance fitted the concept of a scholar. His face was thin, sensitive, delicately boned and, in a way, agreeable. Less agreeable was that he rarely smiled and often wore a worried frown. His vision was poor, perhaps from years of intense studying, and he wore rimless glasses through which dark green eyes-Lord's strongest feature-looked out with alertness mingled with suspicion. He was tall and lean, the last because food held no interest for him. He regarded meals as a waste of time and ate because his body required it; that was all. Women attuned to sensitive men found Vincent Lord attractive. Men seemed divided, either liking or detesting him. His field of expertise was steroids. This included male and female hormones-testosterone, estrogen, progesterone-which affect fertility, sexual aggressiveness and birth control, and during that period of the fifties when the Pill was just beginning to be used, the subject of steroids commanded wide scientific and commercial interest. After earning his Ph.D., and since his work on steroid synthesis was going well, it seemed logical for Dr. Lord to take a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, also at U of 1. The university was cooperative, financing for a "postdoc" was obtained readily from a government agency, and the two years passed amid continued scientific success and only minor personal problems. The problems arose from Lord's habit, close to an obsession, of looking over his shoulder mentally and asking himself. Did I do the right thing? He brooded: Had he made a mistake by remaining "in-house" at U of P Should he have cut loose and gone to Europe? Would Europe have supplied a more rounded education? The questions most of them unnecessary-multiplied persistently. They also made him moody and bad-tempered, a trait that would persist and lose him friends. And yet-another facet of the paradoxical prism which was Vincent Lord-he had a high opinion of his worth and work, an opinion that was wholly justified. Therefore it did not surprise him when, at the end of his two-year "postdoc," the University of Illinois offered him a post as assistant professor. He accepted. Again he remained "in-house.”