The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [655]
Patient’s condition deteriorated rapidly, with increasing symptoms of disorientation and delirium, high fever. Extensive urticaria appeared on arm and upper torso. Attempted to relieve fever by repeated applications of cold water, to no avail. Patient being incoherent, requested permission to amputate from husband; permission denied on grounds that death appeared imminent, and patient “would not want to be buried in pieces.”
Repeated penicillin injection. Patient lapsed into unconsciousness shortly thereafter, and expired just before dawn.
I DIPPED MY QUILL again, but then hesitated, letting the drops of ink slide off the sharpened point. How much more should I say?
The deeply-ingrained disposition for scientific thoroughness warred with caution. It was important to describe what had happened, as fully as possible. At the same time, I hesitated to put down in writing what might amount to an admission of manslaughter—it wasn’t murder, I assured myself, though my guilty feelings made no such distinctions.
“Feelings aren’t truth,” I murmured. Across the room, Brianna looked up from the bread she was slicing, but I bent my head over the page, and she returned to her whispered conversation with Marsali by the fire. It was no more than mid-afternoon, but dark and rainy outside. I had lit a candle by which to write, but the girls’ hands flickered over the dim table like moths, lighting here and there among the plates and platters.
The truth was that I didn’t think Rosamund Lindsay had died of septicemia. I was fairly sure that she had died of an acute reaction to an unpurified penicillin mixture—of the medicine I gave her, in short. Of course, the truth also was that the blood poisoning would certainly have killed her, left untreated.
The truth also was that I had had no way of knowing what the effects of the penicillin would be—but that was rather the point, wasn’t it? To make sure someone else might know?
I twiddled the quill, rolling it between thumb and forefinger. I had kept a faithful account of my experiments with penicillin—the growing of cultures on media ranging from bread to chewed pawpaw and rotted melon rind, painstaking descriptions of the microscopic and gross identification of the Penicillium molds, the effects of—to this point—very limited applications.
Yes, certainly I must include a description of the effects. The real question, though, was—for whom was I keeping this careful record?
I bit my lip, thinking. If it was only for my own reference, it would be a simple matter; I could simply record the symptoms, timing, and effects, without explicitly noting the cause of death; I was unlikely to forget the circumstances, after all. But if this record were ever to be useful to someone else . . . someone who had no notion of the benefits and dangers of an antibiotic . . .
The ink was drying on the quill. I lowered the point to the page.
Age—44, I wrote slowly. In this day, casebook accounts like this often ended with a pious description of the deceased’s last moments, marked—presumably—by Christian resignation on the part of the holy, repentance by the sinful. Neither attitude had marked the passage of Rosamund Lindsay.
I glanced at the coffin, sitting on its trestles under the rain-smeared window. The Lindsays’ cabin was very small, not suited for a funeral in the pouring rain, where a large number of mourners were expected. The coffin was open,