Dear Dr. Meriwether,
I have very much enjoyed your
stories and have shared them with the extended Selby clan. They remind
me of some stories I've heard from Dr. Gardner, including hillbilly
medicine in this part of the world. He tells a hilarious anecdote of
curing a woman of food poisoning in a remote cabin up in the Clinch
Mountain range. He instructed her sons to dispose of the "head cheese"
(also called "souse" or "souse loaf" that she had stored on a plank of
wood in the shade). The next morning when he arrived at his office in
Tazewell, there were the two boys doubled over and vomiting
energetically.
Your stories also bring to mind stories my mother would tell us of
working at the "accident room" at Union Memorial Hospital in downtown
Baltimore. The stereotypically stupid-but-kindly Irish policemen
usually played a role in her accounts. For example, after being
reprimanded over and over again for not collecting body parts after a
trauma for possible reattachment, a cop brought my mother a Roi Tan
cigar box full of brains from a jumper suicide. Another time the ER doc
was looking in a transient's ear with one of those old, heavy
otiscopes. "Dent!" he called. "Get over here! There's something
looking back at me!" Turned out that the homeless man's ear was full of
maggots. In a very weird small world incident, I happen to know that
the doctor's name was Burgwyn. He was an OB doc on temporary assignment
from Richmond. Years later his son and I were on the faculty at a
boarding school together!
Dad also has many stories that we appreciate. One that sticks out
in my mind is when he convinced that giant psychiatric VA hospital in
Kentucky to let him start a nuclear medicine department. You may
already know that, despite his choosing a psychiatrist as my godfather,
Dad doesn't like psychiatric disorders. Part of the raw deal he got was
being made medical director! (I think the hospital had 1000 psychiatric
beds). Anyway, his very first patient revealed that he had killed his
father, cut off the father's head, put it on a fencepost, and conversed
with it for several years before being discovered. I remember Dad
saying that "he seemed so normal."
yours,
Henry
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