Shadows on the Grass by Isak Dinesen

Author:Isak Dinesen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141961460
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Great Gesture

I was a fairly famous doctor to the squatters of the farm, and it happened that patients came down from Limoru or Kijabe to consult me. I had been, in the beginning of my career, miraculously lucky in a few cures, which had made my name echo in the manyattas. Later I had made some very grave mistakes, of which I still cannot think without dismay, but they did not seem to affect my prestige; at times I felt that the people liked me better for not being infallible. This trait in the Africans comes out in other of their relations with the Europeans.

My consultation hour was vaguely from nine to ten, my consultation room the stone-paved terrace east of my house.

On most days my activity was limited to driving in the sick people to the hospital in Nairobi or up to that of the Scotch Mission at Kikuyu, both of which were good hospitals. There would almost always be plague about somewhere in the district; with this you were bound to take the sufferers to Nairobi plague hospital, or your farm would be put in quarantine. I was not afraid of plague, since I had been told that one would either die from the disease or rise from it as fit as ever, and since, besides, I felt that it would be a noble thing to die from an illness to which popes and queens had succumbed. There would likewise almost always be smallpox about, and gazing at old and young faces round me, stamped for life like thimbles, I was afraid of smallpox, but Government regulations strictly kept us to frequent inoculations against the illness. As to other diseases like meningitis or typhoid fever, whether I drove the patients into Nairobi or tried to cure them myself out on the farm, I was always convinced that I should not catch the sickness – my faith may have been due to an instinct, or may have been in itself a kind of protection. The first sais that I had on the farm, Malindi – who was a dwarf, but a great man with horses – died from meningitis actually in my arms.

Most of my own practice was thus concerned with the lighter accidents of the place – broken limbs, cuts, bruises and burns – or with coughs, children’s diseases and eye diseases. At the start I knew but little above what one is taught at a first-aid course. My later skill was mostly obtained through experiments on my patients, for a doctor’s calling is demoralizing. I arrived at setting a broken arm or ankle with a splint, advised all through the operation by the sufferer himself, who very likely might have performed it on his own, but who took pleasure in setting me to work. Ambition a few times made me try my hand at undertakings which later I had to drop again. I much wanted to give my patients Salvarsan – which in those days was

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