Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [87]
“Borne home on a stretcher, all out helpless,” as she put it, she was immediately admitted to Baldwin Memorial Hospital, where she had spent the previous yuletide season. This Christmas she found the place “full of old rain crows & tree frogs only — & accident victims — & me.” On December 23, she informed Betty Boyd Love, “I am languishing on my bed of semi affliction, this time with AWRTHRITUS or, to give it all it has, the acute rheumatoid arthritis, what leaves you always willing to sit down, lie down, lie flatter, etc. . . . I will be in Milledgeville Ga. a birdsanctuary for a few months, waiting to see how much of an invalid I am going to get to be . . . but I don’t believe in time no more so its all one to me.”
Lying in her “horsepital” bed, she thought back on Dunbar’s Mind and Body, which had so fascinated her in Iowa City. “These days you caint even have you a good psychosomatic ailment,” she wrote Betty. And she read T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, earning her a reputation among the nurses as a “mystery fan.”
Not unlike bald, round-faced Dr. Block, a stethoscope hung about his neck, in “The Enduring Chill” — so “irresistible to children” that “they vomited and went into fevers to have a visit from him” — Flannery’s attending physician, Dr. Charles Fulghum, was a beloved general practitioner in Milledgeville. “He was a little fella, sort of makes me think of Old Doc on Gunsmoke,” says town resident Margaret Uhler. “He was delightful and everybody loved him.” He was an internist, when, according to his partner Dr. Zeb Burrell, “Internal medicine was the Cadillac of specialties, not in income but intellect. Internists were thought of as the diagnosticians of the time. Physicals consisted of an hour-long conversation with the patient, followed by an hour-long checkup.” Dr. Fulghum had for many years been one of the Cline family’s regular doctors, and had served as a pallbearer at the funerals of both Flannery’s father and her aunt Gertie.
Dr. Fulghum initially concurred with Dr. Maidman’s diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, treating his patient with cortisone, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, with powerful anti-inflammatory properties. As Flannery informed her agent, “Am in the hospital, taking Cortisone, a new drug for that, & am improving.” While correct about the recent discovery of the treatment — earning a 1950 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, for Drs. Kendall, Hench, and Reichstein — her expected improvement turned out to be wishful. The cortisone kept her alive, but her alarming fevers continued rising. Given the crisis, Dr. Fulghum contacted Dr. Arthur J. Merrill, an internist and Georgia’s first kidney specialist, at Emory University in Atlanta. Over the telephone, Dr. Merrill suggested a likely diagnosis of disseminated lupus erythematosus. He also spoke quite honestly and directly with Mrs. O’Connor about her daughter’s chances.
In February, on the recommendation of Dr. Merrill, Flannery was transferred to Emory University Hospital. Located on the main campus, in the residential Druid Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, the Italianate-style hospital, built in 1922 as Wesley Memorial, was a 320-bed facility, treating more than 11,500 patients a year. Under the care of the forty-two-year-old physician she came to refer to as “Scientist Merrill,” or, simply, “the Scientist,” she underwent a battery of tests. As she told Betty Boyd Love, “I stayed there a month, giving generous samples of my blood to this, that and the other technician, all hours of the day and night.” The LE cell test — the first lupus test, developed in 1948 — confirmed Dr. Merrill’s diagnosis. Yet her mother, fearing the shock of her discovering