FROM AN AUTUMN JOURNAL
31
and feels too weak to leave her house. Penicillin? I ask, confused.
Yes, to stop the bleeding. I realize there is no use discussing the mat–
ter on the telephone; I wait till she comes back to work the next
day, when I get the full story. It seems she has finally felt so sick
she has gone to a doctor- not a Harlem doctor, but a white man–
who, despite her gross symptoms, examines her only cursorily, gives
her the injection of penicillin and charges her $10! She is to return
for additional shots twice a week.
What to do in this situation!
If
I interfere I know she will pro–
foundly resent it. Yet how can I stay silent in the face of such mal–
practice? Moving most carefully, I try to explain t hat penicillin has
but a single purpose, to kill germs; it cannot possibly help her con–
dition. Won't she please go to a good clinic, perhaps Woman's Hos–
pital? But even as I speak, I can see her mounting sullenness, her
angry suspicion not of the doctor but of me- she is not only going
to ignore my advice but probably leave the job. And sure enough,
the following Monday her sister phones to say she is not returning.
I am much shaken by this incident, especially after I discuss
it with our pediatrician whom I happen to see the same day, the
most devoted of medical men, who assures me this is an everyday
affair in this city, the giving of antibiotics in situations where they
cannot conceivably serve any purpose. The doctor who has treated
my maid is not himself ignorant, he is venal: he is exploiting the
ignorance of the general population who know of the existence of
the "wonder drugs" without knowing their uses and who always have
a magical feeling about injections!
But here, in the case of my cleaning woman, is medical venality
meeting up with primitiveness: what about all the cases right in
my own small circle of relatives and friends where there is a con–
siderable amount of medical knowledge and sophistication and yet
there are so many examples of a complete lack, on the part of the
doctors, of the kind of responsibility which we have the right to
assume in the medical profession? I think of the time M. was told
she was "healthy .as a horse" when in fact she was dragging around
with
a plus 50 metabolism, of S. being told that for emotional
reasons she was simulating pregnancy when indeed she was already
three months pregnant, of D. being told-a telephone diagnosis!-
