Writer’s Digest

The following are extracts of books from Jamestowne Bookworks and other author publications (link to source), refreshed from time to time with another set. The first is from a children’s book, the second about a remarkable working-class Londoner, and the third is from the memoir of a surgeon in late 19th century New York City.

1) Talking to Bees. An introduction to The Boy Who Could Bee by Rowan Gordon.

Honeybees can’t talk like us, but they need a language. Hive workers share instructions for building a home. Field bees receive directions to gather food. And communication keeps the family at peace. Did I write ‘peace’?Ahem. More about that later.
Nothing is better than talking to give and receive information. Sometimes, however, we use sign language to express feelings, needs and wants. I remember the exuberant hi-fives we gave our team on winning at sports days. A lady at my school kept us safe from traffic by holding up her arms at the crossing. And don’t forget the smells. They carry messages to turn heads, like the aroma of cinnamon apple pie.
Bees are chatterboxes, but they use sounds, smells, signs and even dance instead of words. These are codes for a language called Bee, translated into Old English nouns in this book. A hive couldn’t be an intelligent family of insects without it. If you have watched bees closely, you know they aren’t as dim-witted as people think. They depend on instincts, of course, but also make careful choices and are a lot brighter than the average robot. I doubt they have any self-awareness, but I dare say that each has a ‘personality’ marking them as different from the next bee. Some might even call it a soul.
The monk Brother Adam lived close to bees throughout his long life and never lost a sense of wonder. He talked and listened to them buzzing around his hives, but neither understood the other. He cared for them, never taking too much honey, and got irritated when people swatted them for getting too close. The real-life monk died in his monastery in 1996, only two years short of a centenarian. His name and fame are resurrected here in a fictional character.
Forty years ago, the village boy Joe and his older cousin Emily from London spent the summer holidays helping the monk in a Devonshire beeyard. They didn’t realize that the grumpy beekeeper and his stinging insects were joint guardians of an ancient mystery sought by greedy hands. The boy and girl tell their side of the story, and the honeybees tell theirs in alternating chapters because they can talk too.

2) Introductory biography by Roger Gosden from Various Verses by Gordon Burness

Gordon was born in London on May 7, 1928. When he died in the same city at age 86, he left no large footprint in history, but those close to him knew that a remarkable man had passed. He had none of the career achievements we expect in a notable life, but instead, he excelled as one of those great amateurs British people are proud of.
In his own words, his school education “was virtually terminated” in 1939 by the outbreak of War. Two years later he was evacuated to the safety of Wales where he often got into trouble and “was punched to the ground by the headmaster for being the worst behaved boy in school”. He was exiled to a remote hill farm from which he had to ride on horseback to school, but there were opportunities for absorbing practical knowledge of birthing cows, slaughtering pigs, and learning how to fish and shoot. He returned to London in time for the V-2 rocket bombardment in 1944, but the family home was spared.
His first phase of life over, he enrolled as an apprentice in a factory, working as a toolmaker until it closed when he was given a redundancy payout of ₤200 ($350). He had no other paper qualifications, but eventually found a job as a security officer on a property where he had once hunted illegally: the poacher turned gamekeeper.
In the post-war years of meat rationing, poaching on private land was an irresistible temptation because he could earn not only a savory supper but also from the sale of pheasants and rabbits to buddies at his factory. When the factory and poaching were behind him, his third phase was a deepening interest in wildlife, for which he exchanged his shotgun with a camera. He learned how to track animals and became an expert mimic of birdsong, but apart from a single trip to Scotland he never traveled far from his home turf, which he knew intimately. He published beautifully illustrated articles in wildlife magazines and became widely known in naturalist circles after 1962, when accompanied by two young brothers Gary and Phil Cliffe, he discovered a very rare albino badger living in a local wood.
That was when the editor met him for the first time under inauspicious circumstances. He was a young teenager watching the same badger den (“sett”) one night when the trio surprised him by shining a flashlight on his perch in a tree. Gordon was unhappy to have someone stumbling on his pet project, but after the next meeting, this time in daylight, they became lifelong friends. The first of his two books, The White Badger published in 1970, sold well, and the story was featured nationally on children’s television.
His fourth phase began in the early 1970s when he took up oil painting. He completed thirty-two canvases ranging from landscapes to animals to fantasy, and they hung in his home gradually glazed with nicotine. He painted to a background of classical music, and particularly loved Wagner’s Ring Cycle which he called “a thirteen-hour cerebral orgasm”. His brush technique was excellent, especially considering he was untutored in the art.
When he was no longer inspired to paint, he turned to poetry, his fifth phase. Despite little exposure to English literature and anthology in school, he was a natural wordsmith and told me his compositions reflected “our personal frailties and his personal views.” His oeuvre is not a large legacy, but it is as revealing of the man’s character and broad interests as his paintings. He could be very droll, loved making jokes and limericks, and was unfailingly cheerful even towards the end when nearly blind and in poor health. The front cover of this book shows his fun-loving heart: he could spend weeks poring over a painting or poem created to amuse himself or a rare visitor.
He loved the ladies, and they returned the favor because he was charming and funny. Although several of them fell in love with him, he never married, which was a great kindness because he prized his privacy.
From 1987 he retired to care for an ailing brother and an elderly mother. For nearly two decades after they died, he was virtually a recluse, only leaving home (and most reluctantly) for a medical emergency or a follow-up appointment. His retiring habits were badger-like. Josie, a good-hearted neighbor, mailed his letters and brought home shopping, including the all-important cigarettes. He smoked heavily from his boyhood days in Wales and over the years, I noticed his ceilings and walls yellowing, finally turning deep orange. “Fags (sic) help me think,” he told me.
Gordon had a deep interest in science, often asking searching questions about astronomy and biology. He was ahead with news about the Hubble telescope and invented plausible theories about the clocklike pineal gland and the tapetum in the eyes of nocturnal animals. His ingenious mind led to the manufacture and marketing of a couple of mechanical devices, but he forgot to take out patents.
He could have achieved much more had he started life in better times and with more advantages. But he never complained and had no wants beyond a smoke, the latest test cricket score, and a chinwag with a friend. He said he felt lucky because he had done everything he wanted. It is a rare privilege to have known a fully satisfied human being. Badger Watch is his most beloved poem:

I found them on a sunlit morning: excavations, deep, industrious.
Endless tunnels; spilling, yawning, all along the boundary hedge.
I must return to see the badgers; shy, nocturnal, so retiring.
Powerful, patient, non-enquiring lovers of obscurity.

Daylight fades and shadows lengthen as I breast the rising ground:
Careful how my footsteps fall; from now on I must make no sound.
All-important wind direction; bluebell-laden, blowing gently;
One place to avoid detection; leeward of the badger mounds.

Above, the first star glows, so soon to drown again as pastel moon,
Confident at tree-top height, paints the scene with borrowed light.
A tawny owl on silent wings, floating out from woodland’s edge,
Content on smaller, furrier things, ignores me crouching in the hedge.

Deep in shadow, rhythmic murmurs; louder than the whispering trees.
Now the dusky silence shatters; senses reel – a badger sneeze!
Up into the silver clearing; fifteen feet away, no more,
Heavy bodies in procession; leading them, a kingly boar.

With sow and triplet cubs he stands; alert, prepared to bolt for home.
Striped heads weave the scented air; a masterpiece in monochrome.
All is well, the cubs are playing. Parents too, pretend to fight.
Grey mass swirling, bowling over. Joyous cries ring through the night.

Ever closer, tumbling badgers. What price now my hiding place?
Heartbeats pound my shrinking form; the boar and I are face to face!
A life-long second thus, we stare; man and beast, both minds aware
Of ancient memories laid bare to sunder night’s enchanted air.

Then, wildly down the bracken slope; badgers fleeing, sore afraid.
Thudding footsteps, ever fainter, echo through the empty glade.
Trudging home through man-made world, no longer does my spirit sing.
Nature’s spell lets loose her hold. Perhaps I hadn’t seen a thing.

3) From A Surgeon’s Story. The Autobiography of Robert T. Morris, M.D. edited and extended by Roger Gosden and Pam Walker. Chapter 3: Interning at Bellevue (Hospital in New York City)

AFTER GRADUATING FROM medical college in 1882, I went up for examination for position on the Bellevue Hospital staff and got in on the Fourth Surgical Division. A wholly new phase of professional life appeared. Responsibility! Previously, when acting in the role of unofficial assistant to other doctors, it had not occurred to me that any particular responsibility went with assuming the care of patients. They simply appeared at the office or hospital and the doctors simply did the right thing or otherwise as the case might be. It was this “otherwise” that now began to loom very large and to weigh heavily on my conscience.
Bellevue, situated on the waterfront of East River, had at that time not quite eight hundred beds but even at that was the largest general hospital in the country. As one of the group of hospitals under charge of the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction of New York City, it served as a reception hospital for the steady stream of injured and ill people who were being brought in at all times of day or night by its own ambulances and by transfer ambulances from other hospitals. Hopeless chronic cases, the insane, and cases of contagious disease were sent over to the Island Hospitals in East River—the final stranding place of unfortunates thrown off the rushing currents of a great city’s life. Emergency cases brought in from the streets that could pay for more refined care elsewhere were transferred at suitable times later. Sturgis Pavilion and Marion Sims Pavilion had pay beds. On the whole, this hospital gave its medical and surgical staff enormous experience in the diagnosis and treatment of almost every known kind of illness or injury. Patients were coming in or being brought in “every minute,” so to speak. The more important cases were transferred by ambulance to New York Hospital, although a naughty rumor had it that “sure deaths” went to Bellevue.
Boastful by nature and youthfully bumptious, I had told other student assistants of the superior advantages that had fallen to my lot at New Haven. I had a marked tendency to do “little things” independently without referring the cases to responsible members of the staff in accordance with hospital rules, but I was promptly humbled and shown that there are no little things in medicine. For instance, after I had applied a wet dressing of carbolic acid solution to a scratched finger and sent the boy away, Dr. C. A. Powers happened to intercept him in the doorway and brought him straight back telling me that the hospital might be subjected to a suit for damages. Why? Carbolic acid solution had the peculiar effect of causing gangrene when applied to fingers or toes.
Little things in medicine and surgery may have a dreadful calamity rate to their account anyway. They may be like some little word in the clause of a will, or like a small nut that makes a difference with machinery if it is on or off. No one knows how many useful people have suffered and died because application of court plaster or some similar home treatment imprisoned microbes in a small cut on the hand. People forget that nature is always watching for opportunities to allow microbes to grow and, so far as anybody really knows, is quite as much interested in the welfare of a streptococcus as in any anthropocentric philosopher who is convinced that the world was made for man and possibly for him in particular. A pig has very much the same idea in regard to his own importance and goes into action on that basis quite as confidently and earnestly as the philosopher. When it comes to a test, we learn that the microbe is the final winner overall animal and plant life. The last living thing on Earth will almost certainly be a microbe.
Thousands of people have died because they took a cathartic for the relief of a little thing like a stomach ache when the latter was the first symptom of an impending appendicitis. Many a mother has killed her darling child in such a case by giving a dose of castor oil at a time when nature was intentionally stopping all bowel action for the purpose of allowing an infected appendix to become safely sealed-in and segregated with plastic exudate. Hundreds, and more likely thousands of women, die every year from cancer of the breast because the physician, not wishing to alarm his patient, says that “We will wait and see if the little lump amounts to anything.” By the time the little thing is bigger it is too late for us to save life. Many and many a time when surgeons have believed a small morbid growth to be unimportant and yet worth removing carefully for the microscope, it has shown malignant cells at early stages of growth, but at a time when a radical operation immediately following was completely curative. Once, I snipped what I thought was an unimportant excrescence from the sole of a woman’s foot just as Dr. W. T. Bull came into the room. He said that it was epithelioma; my scissors had possibly sent malignant cells into the patient’s circulation and she might die of cancer as a result of my not knowing better.
A girl came in with a loosely applied splint for a fracture of the forearm with so little apparent displacement of bones that I simply tightened the bandages firmly and was sending her out when Dr. L. A. Stimson asked about the case. He said that a firmly applied splint of that length and pressing into the elbow joint would almost certainly cause ischemic paralysis, costing the patient the use of her arm, and subjecting the hospital to the danger of a suit for damages.
On the Fourth of July, a boy came in with a small blank cartridge wound of the palm of the hand, just a little insignificant round injured spot to which I had applied some sort of ointment. Dr. Bull when passing asked a question after glancing at the case then said I would learn something. The boy was first given nitrous oxide anesthesia; then a long cut was made in the palm of his hand, and out popped a large felt wad that had expanded beneath the skin. Dr. Bull remarked that the boy would probably have died of lockjaw or septicemia under my dressing. Blank cartridge wounds of that sort caused more deaths than were caused by bullets every Independence Day, he said, because patients get into the offices of doctors who are not surgeons and the superficial wound looks a trifling affair. Many doctors do not know about the felt wad just under the little hole and its lockjaw consequences.
Theoretically, members of the visiting staff were responsible for the welfare of all the patients in the wards, but they came to the hospital for only a part of each day to operate, make rounds, and study case histories. The senior and junior house surgeons came next in order of responsibility, but they were extremely busy preparing patients for operations, assisting at operations, adjusting splints, going on rounds with the visiting surgeons, examining newly admitted patients, and jotting down notes for me as third assistant to amplify and to enter in the record books.
As a third assistant I had the detail work of carrying out orders from the house surgeon. This meant immediate and direct responsibility. Dressings had to be changed frequently because the permanent dressing did not belong to routine then as now. Prescriptions were written and medicines administered on my authority. I had to know that digitalis and whiskey given at the same time for holding up a flagging heart in pneumonia might overcome all of the other symptoms of pneumonia as well.
There was endless work in changing and adjusting splints if patients had a muscle spasm and could not rest or could not sleep because of discomfort from incorrectly adjusted apparatus. I was on first call for secondary hemorrhage day or night—something that occurred not infrequently and in a terrifying way even though tourniquets had been applied loosely according to routine, ready for quick action in some amputation cases. We used to say that Dr. Gouley knew within an hour of when secondary hemorrhage would occur. Among the patients we had at Bellevue, delirium tremens commonly came on in the night following the shock of operative work or a fracture.
Management of hysteria or of sudden mania belonged to my work, both day and night. We saw a good deal of unstable mental balance. I had to take my turn in the admitting office and make sure that patients were sent to the correct wards. I missed it one night by sending a typhus fever case and an early stage smallpox case to the general medical wards. This resulted in the death of one of our nurses from typhus fever, and a stricken orderly. We shall never know who else was exposed to the tiny carriers of typhus fever or to smallpox germs before the visiting physicians made correct diagnoses in daylight. The two patients were subsequently transferred to “The Island.”
Rigors following the passing of urethral sounds and catheters had to be quieted with quinine, tincture of iron, and whiskey—several such cases in a day perhaps. The responsibility of having human life and comfort so largely in my hands and the fear of doing the wrong thing weighed so heavily that I became sleepless and could not rest at night because of turning so many cases over and over in my mind, minute after minute. In the morning, patients who had caused worry were so often in better condition than had been anticipated so I decided then and there to take an example from the French doll that closes its eyes at once when placed upon its back. By an effort of the will I decided to become a French doll at eleven o’clock each night. It soon became a habit which has persisted to the present day. Interruption caused by emergency calls or social duties has not broken the fixed general habit. We used to hear laymen talking about surgeons walking the floor all night in advance of some important operation. It would be much better for the patient to walk the floor all night under such circumstances while the surgeon is sleeping, because absolute composure is essential for him at all times. There is no place anywhere in the surgical world for a tired, worried, or temperamental operator.
Surgical operative work in our division covered a large range, everything from excision of joints to operations on the eye. After some preliminary study with Dr. Pooley, I had removed three lenses for cataracts without losing a particle of vitreous and had operated for synechias and strabismus, something that I would now hold to have been unjustifiable, although the results were first rate. There is much more to these cases than the mere operative procedure but this was not realized at the time.
An amusing incident occurred with one of the squint cases. A burglar with spinal injury after being shot in the back was being guarded constantly by policemen day and night. He had refused my offer to straighten his squint, but I wanted very much to do it and one day a bright idea came to mind. I naively said that if he would allow me to do the operation, his appearance would be so changed that he would not be recognized by detectives until the police had recorded a new description. That appeal was instantaneously effective; and the internal strabismus was straightened the next day with the knowledge of the police guard. As the injured back became daily stronger, police vigilance waned because of the long, tiresome watch. One day, when the policeman had stepped out into another part of the ward for a momentary chat with one of the nurses, my burglar sprang up, seized a bread knife and the day-suit of an orderly, leaped from a window, climbed over the hospital wall into 27th Street, and made his escape.
We had desperate characters of many kinds at Bellevue. Slim Jim came from Utah to shoot an old acquaintance who he had trailed to New York. They met in Union Square. He killed the other man on the spot, but received a fatal wound in the groin from which he died a few days later. Meanwhile he regaled me with many stories of his exploits. On one occasion in New Mexico he had held up a stagecoach. All of the passengers had their hands up except an old woman who picked up a green umbrella and began whacking him over the head and drove him away. He explained to me that he couldn’t shoot a woman. The burglar of that day was very different from the modern dope fiend. He was often enough a man who acquired high-grade skill in the use of tools, carefully avoided interruption when at work, read the editorial columns in the newspapers, and humorously referred to his work as being similar to big business in its nature but more direct and time-saving.
Life histories told by Bellevue patients would have made rich material for any writer, but confidences were reserved for the doctor. They very well knew he wouldn’t tell. Sometimes there were well-bred rascals who had fallen from high estate. Many who were not rascals at all had been battered down by drink although struggling against it until it finally won. Journeyman printers falling on jobless days belonged in the latter group. Like the wild pigeon, they were numerous in that day, but now belong chiefly to news-press reminiscences. Excepting for alcoholic discards from good families, most of the people at Bellevue had never had a fair chance. That is why doctors, the clergy, and the police, well aware of the fact, take so little stock in talk about a criminal class. I remember once standing by the bedside of a bleary-eyed dissolute woman who was watching one of the nurses as she went about her helpful, kindly work in the wards. I asked why she was watching the nurse so closely. “Oh, if I could only be like her,” she replied with an eagerness that expressed a pathetic yearning. There had never been a chance for much luck in that poor, thin, flickering life.
People who for lack of other occupation enjoy academic discussion over the relative values of heredity and environment may step into Bellevue at any time for a concrete picture of the way in which heredity furnishes the kind of clay and environment the molding. I often went in to enjoy a chat with an aged Englishman of the “Trader Horn” type but more erudite, a linguist, poet, and erstwhile writer who had traveled much in his day. He was in the hospital with a hopeless fracture of the hip from slipping on the icy sidewalk and his career, such as it was, came to a close. Orders had been received to have him transferred to Blackwell’s Island, the last junk heap for human wrecks. It was my duty to inform him of the order from Warden O’Rourke and I said that he would have to be transferred unless friends could make other arrangements. He replied in a dazed way, very slowly, “Friends! Friends! I have no friends. You are the only one who has spoken a kind word to me for years.” Sooner or later he would be placed on one of the zinc-covered tables in the long room at the morgue, and at his feet would be placed a much worn and soiled official placard bearing the simple legend, “No Friends.” From the morgue he would go to the potter’s field or to the dissecting room where students, between cigarettes, would examine his muscle attachments and nerve branches, calling attention to anything of interest about his anatomy.
Sometimes there were people with too many friends. I remember a commercial traveler brought in as an emergency case after an altercation in which he had been fatally injured. A published notice of his death brought to the hospital two wives, neither one of whom had previously known of the existence of the other. I was present when they met for the first time. After a few preliminary expressions of surprise and an exceedingly intense scrutinizing of each other, they fell into ordinary conversation without a trace of anger. It was one of the most reasonable conversations that I have ever heard between two people. In the end they agreed to divide his possessions between them, although in point of law no such division would have been possible. They would share the expense of the funeral if his father did not take charge of that. I presume that no large question of property was involved. In all probability, the sympathy of one wife for the sorry plight of the other had disarmed other reactions. The sympathy happened to be mutual and I looked upon the incident as a fine display of human nature.
Many cases in the day’s work were of interest quite aside from their surgical bearings. They come to mind imperfectly after all these years. A young woman perhaps seventeen or eighteen years of age was brought in by the ambulance. Her refined bearing and neat clothing did not belong to the common run of cases. What was her history? She had undergone a malpractice operation (for abortion) somewhere and attempted to walk home but fainted in the street. She was brought in with a curbstone cut on her forehead resulting from the fall, and told us the rest of the story while still confused and not intending to do so. On the way to the hospital or before that time she had destroyed all telltale clues for identification. The name on the entrance register was not hers. Three or four days of hospital treatment were necessary before she could be allowed to return home. In the morning newspapers there was an account of the mysterious disappearance of a young woman belonging to a prominent family. The description fitted our patient very well and I went in to see about it. Before reaching her side an old Irish woman in a nearby bed grasped my arm and asked me to lean over and listen quietly.
“Doctor, dear, that poor girrul niver had a wink o’ shleep at all. Just moanin’ low all th’ night. Do plaze give her something. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ says I to her and ’twas no answer at all I got. Thin of course I was guessing. Ah, poor cheeld, poor little darlint. She’s too young for that, whativer it is.”
Then I moved to the girl’s bed and to a whispered account of the disappearance. A wild, desperate look flashed across her face for a moment … (chapter truncated)