Johnny Swanson - Eleanor Updale [14]
The doctor seemed uncomfortable too. ‘I’ll be happy to talk to you, Johnny,’ he replied, without looking up. ‘But you will have to come and see me at my old surgery. I can open it up specially for you, if you’ve got something on your mind.’
‘Oh no,’ said Johnny. ‘I didn’t mean that sort of embarrassing. It’s just that I’m ashamed that I don’t know this already. You said you were going to the sanatorium. My teacher talked about it too. What exactly is a sanatorium?’
The doctor laughed, and asked Johnny to pass the sandpaper. ‘Oh, is that all? What a relief. Well, if they taught Latin at that school of ours, you’d be able to work it out. It comes from the verb sanare, meaning “to cure”, or “to heal”, and the adjective sanus, –a, –um, meaning “healthy”. It’s a place of health: a kind of hospital. But a special one. It’s just for people who’ve got tuberculosis. That’s the disease I was checking you for at school the other day. We sometimes call it TB, or consumption.’
‘Everyone’s talking about it at school. They say it makes you cough up blood and shrivel away to skin and bone.’
‘That’s one way of putting it, yes,’ said Dr Langford. ‘It usually affects the lungs, but it can strike other organs too. It can give you a very nasty condition called scrofula – horrible purple lumps on the neck.’
Johnny automatically put his hand to his own throat and started feeling for bumps, rolling the sound of the word ‘scrofula’ round his mouth.
‘Rubber solution!’ said the doctor. ‘It’s the little yellow tube.’ Johnny gave it to him, and he continued working on the bike with the dexterity of a surgeon, chatting on about diseases. ‘In the olden days they thought scrofula could be cured by a touch of the King’s hand. They called it the King’s Evil. But it was really just another kind of tuberculosis.’
‘And tuberculosis is TB?’
‘Yes, but we doctors have yet another name for it. Here’s a special word for you, Johnny. This one’s from ancient Greek: phthisis. It’s one of my favourites. Just eight letters, but quite a tongue-twister – and only one vowel, if you don’t count the “i” twice.’ He spelled it out for Johnny. ‘Remember that word, son. Try it out on your teacher and see if he knows what it means. You might need it in a crossword puzzle one day.’
As the doctor stuck a patch over the repair, Johnny tried to fix the word in his memory, saying it again and again; flicking from the first ‘f’ sound of the ‘ph’ into the ‘th’ and then on to the hiss at the end. ‘It sounds like a curse,’ he said.
‘Well, the disease certainly is,’ said Dr Langford. ‘I’m sorry to say that it’s often fatal. Some people get better, but there’s no absolute cure. We do our best for patients with fresh air, good food and exercise. And we keep them away from other people, so that they don’t pass on their germs. Last time there was a TB outbreak in Stambleton we had a big collection to build our sanatorium a few miles out in the country, so there would be less risk in the town.’
‘Was that when all the Dangerfields died?’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘I’ve seen the gravestones in the cemetery.’
The doctor shook his head. ‘Poor Miss Dangerfield. First her beloved brother and his wife were taken by the disease, then their children died, one by one. She nursed them all, you know. I’ll never forget the sight of her weeping over the tiny body of her last dead nephew. And after all that, she lost her fiancé in the war. She was already getting on a bit then. It was her last chance of happiness. She’s the only Dangerfield left now. It’s no wonder she looks so much older than she really is.’ He changed the subject without a pause. ‘Any chalk in that tin? We need it to stop the repair sticking to the inside of the tyre when the tube goes back in.’
Johnny passed the chalk. ‘Why didn’t Miss Dangerfield catch TB? Why haven’t you?’
‘Well, you know, Johnny, we doctors have a way of staying healthy. And it’s like all diseases. Not everyone who comes into contact with a nasty bug gets sick. If they did, the human race would