Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [233]
At year's end, after passing his final exams, when Thomas was appointed to the coveted position of Braithwaite's house officer, Shawn Grogan, a bright and well-connected medical student, found the courage to ask Braithwaite what he might have done to be selected instead of Stone.
“It's quite simple, Grogan,” Braithwaite said. “All you have to do is know your anatomy inside out, never leave the hospital, and prefer surgery over sleep, women, and grog.” Grogan became a pathologist, famous as a teacher in his own right, and famous for his extraordinary girth.
During the war, Thomas was commissioned. He traveled with Braith waite to a field hospital in Europe. In 1946, he returned to Scotland, became a junior registrar, then a senior registrar. He'd skipped a real childhood and gone directly to doctorhood.
Ross came to Scotland on a rare visit. He told Thomas how proud he was of him. “You're my consolation for never having married. That wasn't by choice, by the way—not being married. ‘Perfection of the life or of the work’—I could only do the one. I hope you don't make that mistake.”
Ross planned to retire near the sanatorium, to play rummy at the Ooty Club every night, to catch up on a lifetime of reading, and to learn to play golf with the retired officers who lived there. But just as he did, a cancer made itself known in Ross's good lung. Thomas returned to India at once. He stayed with Ross for the next six months, during which time the cancer spread to his brain. Ross died peacefully, Thomas at his side, the faithful Muthu, old and gray, on the other side, with the many nurses and attenders who had worked with Ross holding vigil.
The funeral brought Europeans and Indians from as far away as Bombay and Calcutta to pay tribute. Ross was buried in the same cemetery where many of his patients rested. “They are heroes, one and all, all those who sleep in this cemetery,” said the Reverend Duncan at the graveside service. “But no greater hero, and no humbler a man, and no better servant of God is buried here than George Edwin Ross.”
THOMAS TOOK AN APPOINTMENT as a consultant surgeon in the Government General Hospital, Madras. But after independence in 1947, things were not the same. Indians now ran the Indian Medical Service, and they were not excited by Englishmen who wanted to stay on, though many did. Thomas knew he had to leave; if it had ever been his land, it no longer was. And that was how, in response to a notice from Matron in the Lancet, he made his voyage on the Calangute to Aden. It was on that ship that Sister Mary Joseph Praise literally fell into his arms and entered his life.
Thomas Stone believed there existed within him the seeds for harshness, for betrayal, for selfishness, and for violence—after all, he was his father's son. He believed the only virtues passed down to him were the virtues of his profession, and they came through books and by apprenticeship. The only suffering that interested him was that of the flesh. For the heartache and the grief of his own loss, he had found the cure and he'd found it by himself. Ross had it wrong, or so Thomas thought: perfection of the life came from perfection of the work. Thomas stumbled on an address by Sir William Osler to graduating medical students in which the man articulated this very thesis:
The master-word is Work, a little one, as I have said, but fraught with momentous sequences if you can but write it on the tablets of your hearts, and bind it upon your foreheads.
“The master-word is Work.” Stone bound it to his forehead. He wrote it on the tablet of his heart. He woke to it and fought sleep for it. Work was his meat, his drink, his wife, his child, his politics, his religion. He thought work was his salvation, until the day he found himself seated in Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, in the room of a child he had abandoned; only then did he admit to his son how completely work had failed him.
CHAPTER 46
Room with a View
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