The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [122]
Since the course was designed for nursing students and for students taking a science elective, the material dealt extensively with clinical medicine—and I thus inadvertently came away with most of what I needed to know to equip Claire Randall to deal with the medical conditions of the eighteenth century.8
Beyond this accidental preparation, of course, I undertook considerable library research (see Part Twelve: Bibliography), and I began to ask questions of one or two doctors whom I had met online.
I’m greatly indebted to Drs. Gary Hoff and Ellen Mandell, among others—not only for their help and advice in describing and dealing with assorted medical conditions, but particularly for their honesty and openness in letting me see a small part of what it means to be a healer, with all the compassion, dedication, and occasional heartbreak that entails.
(MEDICAL) CONDITIONS AND (PLOT) COMPLICATIONS
One of the plot complications of the first book, of course, revolves around Colum MacKenzie’s rather interesting medical condition. People always ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” One writer of my acquaintance replies courteously that he orders them in bulk from the Sears catalog, but my own much less imaginative answer is, “Everywhere!” In the case of Colum MacKenzie, I got the idea off the wall of my university office.
At the time, I had a small room in a condemned building on the ASU campus, with crumbling plaster and an ancient air conditioner, which shook like a reducing machine and caused thousands of panic-stricken crickets (who evidently found the crevices of the thing an ideal breeding ground) to leap out into the room whenever I turned it on. To add visual interest to this hole, I fetched in a packet of very cheap cardboard reproductions of Great Paintings, and applied them lavishly to the walls and doors of my sanctum. Each Great Painting had on the back of it a small notice, this containing a brief biography of the artist.
And … well, when I sat at my desk, talking on the phone, the painting on the wall directly in front of me was one by Toulouse-Lautrec, that’s all. The symptoms of his peculiar disease, including the tendency to impotence and sterility, were included in the biographical note on the back.
You take ideas where you find them.
I picked up Jamie’s dislocated shoulder—and the method of putting back a joint—from a memory of one of Dick Francis’s early racing novels (I don’t remember which one), in which a jockey described in vivid terms both the pain of the injury and its immediate relief.
The descriptions of several common medical conditions and contemporary treatment methods came from the medical research—the contents of Davie Beaton’s surgery was taken from a listing of common medicaments that I found in H. G. Graham’s The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century. The descriptions of procedures in L’Hôpital des Anges in Dragonfly in Amber were based on the colorful variety of medical procedures (urinoscopists, truss fitters, bonesetters, maîtresses sage-femme) described in Professional and Popular Medicine in France, 1770—1830 (Ramsey).
Bouton? Well, I looked down, and there he was. I have several dogs myself; Tippy, the smallest and oldest, always goes to my office with me when I work, and guards me faithfully until I go down to bed at three A.M. He lies on the floor near my feet, straight as a compass needle, pink nose on his paws, and a long, fluffy tail laid out behind him.
So as Mother Hildegarde sat down to play her harpsichord, I looked down, and there was Bouton, stretched out faithfully like a compass needle on the floor at her feet. Given Mother Hildegarde’s occupation, it seemed only natural for her dog to accompany her on her rounds through the Hôpital—it was his own notion to leap up on the patients’ beds and instigate his own form of diagnosis.9
Mr. Willoughby’s knowledge of acupuncture—in fact, Mr. Willoughby’s presence itself—was a matter of sheer necessity; I had to find a way of getting Jamie