Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende

Author:Isabel Allende [Allende, Isabel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Magic Realism
ISBN: 9780007121571
Google: Kfu5QgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 817851
Publisher: Flamingo
Published: 1975-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE 1896-1910

The Hobbs clinic was founded by the celebrated surgeon Ebanizer Hobbs in his own home; it was a large, solid, and elegant residence right in the heart of Kensington, yet they kept tearing down walls, blocking windows, and adding tiles until it became a true horror. Its presence on that elegant street so upset the neighbors that Hobbs's successors had no difficulty buying the adjacent homes to enlarge the clinic, but they kept the Edwardian facades so that from the outside it looked no different from the rows of houses on the block, all identical. Inside it was a labyrinth of rooms, staircases, corridors, and interior windows that didn't look onto anything. It didn't have the typical bullring-style operating room of the old city hospitals—a central circle covered with sawdust or sand and surrounded by galleries for spectators—but small surgery rooms with walls, ceiling, and floors faced with floor tiles and metal plates that were scrubbed with soap and lye once a day because the deceased Dr. Hobbs had been among the first to accept Robert Koch's theory of the propagation of infection and to adopt Joseph Lister's methods for asepsis, which most physicians still rejected out of pride or laziness. It was not easy to change old habits; hygiene was tedious and complicated, and it interfered with the swiftness of operations, which was considered the mark of a good surgeon since it diminished the risk of shock and blood loss. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who believed that infections were produced spontaneously in the body of the patient, Ebanizer Hobbs understood immediately that the germs were outside, on hands, floors, and instruments and in the atmosphere, which is why they sprayed everything from wounds to the air of the operating room itself with phenol. The poor man breathed so much phenol that he died before his time from a renal affection, his skin badly ulcerated, which gave his detractors an opportunity to cling to their own antiquated ideas. Hobbs's disciples, nevertheless, analyzed the air and discovered that germs do not float like invisible birds of prey primed for a sneak attack but are concentrated on dirty surfaces; infection was produced by direct contact, so it was fundamental to clean the instruments thoroughly, use sterilized bandages, and see that surgeons not only zealously washed their hands but when possible wore rubber gloves. These were not the clumsy gloves used by anatomists to dissect cadavers or by some workers to handle chemicals, but a delicate product soft as human skin, made in the United States. They had a romantic origin: a physician, in love with a nurse, wanted to protect her from the eczema caused by disinfectants and had the first rubber gloves made for her; later they were adopted by surgeons for operations. Paulina del Valle had read all this with great interest in the scientific journals lent to her by her relative Don Jose Francisco Vergara, who, though still the scholar of old, by then had heart trouble and had retired to his palace in Vina del Mar.

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