Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [178]
In Casualty, Saleem lay on the ground too weak to sit or stand, semiconscious. Adam, our one-eyed compounder, bent over the patient, and with one swift move made the diagnosis.
Years later Ghosh showed me the correspondence he had with the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who was about to publish Ghosh's seminal series of cases of relapsing fever. The editor felt “Adam's sign” was pretentious. Ghosh defended the honor of his uneducated compounder at the risk of not being published in that prestigious journal.
Dear Dr. Giles,
… in Ethiopia we classify hernias as “below the knee” and “above the knee,” not “direct” or “indirect.” It's another order of magnitude, sir. Our casualty room often has as many as five patients prostrate on the floor with fever. The clinician asks: Is this malaria? Is it typhoid? Or is it relapsing fever? There is no rash to help sort this out (the “rose spots” of typhoid are invisible in our population), though I will grant you that typhoid causes a bronchitis and a slow pulse, and people with malaria often have giant spleens. I would be remiss in publishing a paper on relapsing fever without providing the clinician a practical way to make the diagnosis, particularly in settings where blood and serum tests are hard to come by. The clinician has only to grab the patient's thigh, squeeze the quadriceps muscle, squeeze it hard: Patients with relapsing fever will jump up because of the otherwise silent muscle inflammation and tenderness that is part of this disease. Not only is this a good diagnostic sign, but it can raise Lazarus. This sign was first noted by Adam, and is deserving of the eponym “Adam's sign.”
I could testify to Adam's sign—Saleem yelled and leaped to his feet when Adam mashed. The editor wrote back. He was pleased with all the other revisions but Adam's sign remained a sticking point. Ghosh held his ground.
Dear Dr. Giles,
… there is a Chvostek's sign, a Boas's sign, a Courvoisier's sign, a Quincke's sign—no limit it seems to white men naming things after themselves. Surely, the world is ready for an eponym honoring a humble compounder who has seen more relapsing fever with one eye than you or I will ever see with two.
Ghosh, working in an obscure African hospital, far from the academic mainstream, had his way. The paper was published in the prestigious journal, and no doubt led to his being invited to write a chapter in Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, the bible of senior medical students. Now, here he was, a professor. Hema bought our new professor two beautiful pin-striped suits, one black and the other blue. Also a tweed coat with leather elbow patches, as if to put “Professor” in quotes. The bow tie was his idea. In all things, especially when it cost little and did no harm to others, Ghosh was his own man. The bow tie told the world how pleased he was to be alive and how much he celebrated his profession, which he called “my romantic and passionate pursuit.” The way Ghosh practiced his profession, the way he lived his life, it was all that.
CHAPTER 36
Prognostic Signs
LIFE IS FULL OF SIGNS. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.
Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.
Pus somewhere and Pus nowhere means Pus in the belly.
Low platelets in a woman is lupus until proven otherwise.
Beware of a man with a glass eye and a big liver …
Across the outpatient department, Ghosh would spot a breathless young woman, her cheeks flushed, contradicting her general pallor. Hed suspect narrowing of the mitral valve of the heart, though he'd be hard-pressed to explain exactly why. It would make him listen carefully