The Imperative of Desire by Elena Graf

Author:Elena Graf [Graf, Elena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th century history, World War I, Roaring Twenties, Decadent Berlin, Lesbian history, German History
Publisher: Purple Hand Press
Published: 2021-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

When I returned from leave, my male colleagues, the few who were left, addressed me as “Frau Doktor” instead of “Stahle” or “Countess.” Even the senior doctors were more respectful. They listened attentively while I spoke, instead of staring at their shoes. I might be a woman, and by their definition, weaker and less serious, but now, they couldn’t argue with my credentials. If they did, their own would be invalidated. I’d learned by then that fervent effort or greater knowledge meant little in determining one’s place in the male pecking order. Respect came from playing men’s games and winning their prizes, sometimes right out from under them.

My pleasure in their changed attitudes didn’t last long. While I was writing my dissertation and enduring the misery of my last months of pregnancy, I had almost forgotten how brutal the pace of surgical training could be. Although I was only a junior surgeon, the war had forced all of us to take more responsibility. With the shortage of doctors, we couldn’t afford to worry about formal status. However, I did worry about the medical students under my charge. Their training had been accelerated by the war, and so many faculty had been called up by the military.

The war made me a surgeon. Like the dirty camp doctor, who treated Miss Westerfield, I could remove a foot in minutes. While I became extremely adept at amputations, I was also perfecting my technique at bowel resection and picking shrapnel out of soft tissue. Soon, with the exception of neurosurgery, there were few procedures I wouldn’t undertake. In surgery, practice makes perfect. And the long hours standing in the operating theater paid richly in increased skills.

Once the battle of Verdun began, even more wounded came our way. Hanna regularly needed to massage my aching shoulders and legs, and I often needed to return the favor. I didn’t mind because it was often a prelude to sex, but I hated to see the dear woman so exhausted.

Although pregnancies had fallen off because most of the men were at the front, Hanna and her colleagues worked longer hours to fill in for nurses who had volunteered for the war effort. With so many doctors away in military or field hospitals, the clinic nurses often needed to prescribe drugs and perform minor surgery. It was illegal, but the poor only cared that they were getting treatment and would never tell. Shortages of fuel and food had increased the cases of tuberculosis, scurvy, rickets, and other diseases of poor nutrition. Emaciated women with sickly children came to the clinic looking for help. What they needed most was food, which became scarcer by the day.

I watched Hanna wearing herself to a frazzle. She was always chiding me to pace myself, but she never listened when I advised the same. I often wished I could demand that Hanna moderate her work schedule in the same way I ordered my servants, but she had insisted that I prove she was more to me than a servant, so I dared not say a word.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.