In these things, there are also a bunch of seemingly incongruous letters, which are tightly tied with a thick thread. Judging from the postmark of the orange-yellow cent stamp on the corner of each envelope, they are all written by my father at the Massachusetts General Hospital. I counted a total of 51 letters, which means that the two of them sent letters every other day except two letters a day. I typed three of them and felt like a spy. These letters were all very tender and old-fashioned. The letters were very playful and love poems were Edna Saint Vincent Millay.
In the next few weeks, I will look through other boxes in my house one by one. What I find in those boxes so far reminds me the most is an old black medical bag. My father always carries it when he visits patients in hospitals or nursing homes for so many years. The bag has indeed worn and torn in many places. The leather of his hand has peeled off and medical tape is wrapped everywhere, but the bag is still well protected by that heavy metal buckle. When my father gave it to me, a wire hung the key on it.
There is nothing unusual in the bag. I found a purple inflatable cuff with an old sphygmomanometer folded neatly and put it in a dark blue box. There is also a rubber band tied together, a wooden throat stick, a box of Band-Aid band-aid gauze, several bags of alcohol gauze, a metal reflection hammer with rubber head and a forked metal fork. This fork is about 6 inches long and looks like a tuning fork. In the past, it was often used to test the patient’s hearing by tapping at a distance from the patient’s ear and then slowly approaching until the patient can hear the tapping. There is also a very beautiful Fleischer stethoscope placed in the patient’s chest by his father.
I picked up the stethoscope and held it in my hand. A long-forgotten memory suddenly came to my mind. At that time, I was only six or seven years old. One night, the doctor on duty at McLean Psychiatric Hospital called my father and said that one of his patients suddenly went crazy and clamored for killing on a whim. My father took me to the hospital. I remember that he had just arrived home to prepare dinner. Then, as usual, when he asked his mother at night, he would cover his microphone and ask Harry if you were there. My father nodded at her and got up to answer the phone almost as usual.
A moment later, his dinner was forgotten. He knocked me downstairs, got in the car and let me sit next to him. My mother watched us leave at the door. Soon we were far away. It was already a very long distance for me at that time. I drove into Belmont and drove all the way to the hospital along the driveway.
I guess my father has a special but attractive way to stimulate patients. At first, he would talk in a non-friendly tone and joke with patients. Even if he was stuck in sadness or anxiety, the patients would laugh at him. Maybe no patient or nurse would be surprised when he took his son to the hospital.
In general, he either told the patient that you should be examined first or said something that would have the same effect, rather than asking me to help you. Then he picked me up and put me on the bed, handed me the stethoscope, and put the black stethoscope earplug into my ear, telling me where I should put the metal stethoscope head on the patient’s chest, which seemed to be a heavy child. At that moment, I listened very carefully, and maybe I tried to show a clear expression. At the same time, my father carefully observed the patient’s hand-eye, his face expression, and then he took the stethoscope for the male patient to have a
I stared at the stethoscope so carefully and held it carefully in my hand because I had thought about it many times, and I thought it should be a thousand times. Before exploring the problem like a psychiatrist, my father must have followed the medical training and put those earplugs in his ear to listen to the patient’s heartbeat and breathing, but I also remembered that my father had to leave the table for several nights because of frequent emergencies like that night. He had to go because he had to stay at home when the patient was depressed, and he would be more and more uneasy.
Of course, when he receives this kind of words, he will not decide to take me on a whim most nights. He will throw us straight to the door and go to sleep. I may hear him coming home late at night, and his mother will talk to him while heating dinner for him.
I know that in that long-gone era, all kinds of doctors fulfilled their obligations to patients and willingly interrupted their private lives. Maybe they will regret it again today, but I still hope that the doctor in the sanatorium will have even a little sense of overall responsibility. I hope that my father will rely on the geriatrician to do the same. I don’t think they have ever loved their father heartily, or they can say that they can’t even catch up with his father’s paying a small part in those years. How generous and private his father once loved his patients.
For me, there is a more distant memory. Although that memory is less personal, I think it can be used as an interesting window to understand the world of Boston psychiatry more than half a century ago, so I will add it as a side note after I have seen those long stories.
One of those crates contained some legal documents related to Eugene O ‘Neill. I found some unusual materials in a folder, which recorded a conflict between my father, an old friend and colleague, and the psychiatrist Meryl Moore. O ‘Neill had been close to Moore until he became a father patient.
Moore is not the most outstanding psychiatrist. He is also a writer closely connected with the theater. carlotta, O ‘Neill’s wife, was diagnosed as hysteria and was transferred to Maclean Psychiatric Hospital. After that, he was selected for her examination. Now I find that Moore was kept because of O ‘Neill’s close friend Lawrence Lanner, who is both a famous filmmaker in new york and a director of Tongren Theatre. However, Moore was misdiagnosed and carlotta was treated very unfairly.
Many years later, my father introduced Dr. Moore to me at the Harvard Club in Boston. Although Dr. Moore is an extremely intelligent person, many people regard him as a cute freak. He writes poems and sonnets. He obviously writes a lot. According to him, he is very willing to recite a few thousand poems to his friends and patients. When he listens to them, he always puts some soybean seeds in his pocket and gives them to others happily. After shaking hands with his father, he said that Harry should plant these in your garden. Then he put a few soybean seeds in his father’s palm, and his father thanked him wholeheartedly.
However, according to his father, Moore’s problem is that although his psychiatrist’s professional standard is beyond doubt, his diagnosis of carlotta is too perfunctory and he ignores the fact. carlotta seems to be suffering from mental symptoms. In fact, she has a temporary reaction due to excessive bromide. After being alert to her bromide poisoning, he still refuses to make her sick. On the contrary, he insists that she is mentally ill and tells the staff of Maclean Mental Hospital that he intends to declare her as a legal psychopath. Then he suggests that O ‘Neill should share it with his wife forever, and he seems to have reached this conclusion before examining her.
Later, carlotta O ‘Neill was tortured by this mistake, because O ‘Neill tacitly acquiesced in Moore’s suggestion and agreed to sign it with the co-signature of Dr. Moore, a new york lawyer, insisting that carlotta’s insanity law would strike himself again. Later, carlotta repeated this famous wish and never forgave her husband for this betrayal.
At this time, Dr. Moore had planned to arrange for carlotta to accept permanent hospitalization, that is, he was unwilling to be hospitalized. This incongruity in medical treatment shocked the staff of Maclean Psychiatric Hospital. When his father asked for interventional treatment, carlotta had a face-to-face examination from the perspective of neuropsychiatry. 4 Finally, he had a diagnosis. After completing the examination as required, he thought that carlotta was absolutely not insane, so he should not accept the hospitalization ban.
After the news reached Moore, he made a hostile reaction. One day in April, his father wrote in a long and detailed memo that I received a call from Meryl Moore. He said that several friends of his dramatist were staying in new york. He didn’t say who those people were, but he said that they all believed that carlotta O ‘Neill was a legal psychopath. Their marriage should be dissolved and they should be placed under separate custody. As far as the dramatist is concerned, everything should be handled by people in new york who believe that he is insane. They will make all kinds of decisions for him.
Although my father is very intimate with Dr. Moore, he still shocked his father in this matter because he was unprofessional and quite dangerous from the legal point of view. He said that he was forced to challenge him directly.
I spoke directly. Your patient pointed out that O ‘Neill’s father hadn’t examined him at that time. Maybe he was crazy, but I wasn’t crazy to plan me like this. Then he added that he would do his best to stop the sabotage. His father said that Meryl Moore was still stubborn. Are you crazy? His father warned him that he had put himself in this situation. In the law, it might be called a crime. His father wrote that Moore seemed to flinch, so the call ended.
Soon after, Russell Klaus went to his father and asked him if he could go to new york to talk to O ‘Neill directly. Klaus was a cool-headed man in the theater and O ‘Neill’s most trusted friend. He wanted to do his best to help O ‘Neill solve Murliu’s medical dilemma. The personal misunderstanding was that Mr. Klaus asked his father to have a general psychiatric examination like carlotta.
Father’s conclusion Although O ‘Neill’s misfortune is mainly due to mental factors, which lead to a sharp decline in creativity, from a medical or legal point of view, he is obviously not crazy. He has made a decision, and even though his decision may be greatly influenced by his determined and protective wife, he cannot be deprived of this benefit.
During that examination, O ‘Neill did say that he regretted making concessions at Dr Moore’s suggestion today, and said that he really wanted to reunite his wife. I don’t know after the event, because my father didn’t finish his notes or maybe don’t record them, but I didn’t find them. However, as far as I can guess, O ‘Neill must have found something in his father’s conversation and answer, which made him believe in. I said earlier that the two seemed to get along comfortably and harmoniously, but to explain what prompted O ‘Neill to ask his father to become him, the doctor estimated that it would take a long time to explain some seemingly complicated events
In this issue, I left Maclean Psychiatric Hospital a month ago, and carlotta booked a suite overlooking the river in a nice small hotel opposite my father’s office. After O ‘Neill arrived in Houwan from new york accompanied by a nurse, his father went to pick him up and took him to carlotta. carlotta was still very kind to him. According to his father, although they would have a fierce quarrel in their common life for many years, his father still believed that they were completely dependent on each other.
O ‘Neill told his father that the two men had gone through a lot of hardships together and never stopped hurting each other, but he could not live without carlotta. He knew that she would still protect him as bravely and loyally as she did in the decades when he was most productive. Of course, judging from his physical condition during his father’s treatment, she did follow his father’s instructions to protect him patiently and tirelessly and called him repeatedly when she recognized that she could express her feelings.
When O ‘Neill asks her, she will also call her father, and usually it is very late at night, when she is very depressed. O ‘Neill will tell her the opportunity to talk to Harry for a while, and he will definitely feel better. Until now, I can vividly remember the scene that my father rushed to him with a stethoscope. My father will quickly check his vital signs and then stay there to chat with him for 115 minutes before he goes to bed. Obviously, his father’s company gives him a sense of security and makes him fall asleep more easily.
My mother once explained to me that my father didn’t play a mediating role in carlotta O ‘Neill from time to time, and I also described his dissatisfaction when other families encountered similar difficulties. Despite this, in his long career, he treated and cared for patients, whether he was a prominent person, a destitute person or a person on the edge of the middle class. He finally did his duty as a doctor, and the black medical bag was always with him wherever he went.
When my father stayed in that nursing home, there was more than one doctor. I mean this doctor is the one who caused my father to fall into this crisis.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) is no longer used in this kind of diagnosis. It does not show the shape of cysts or tumors, but reflects the changes of brain waves in different parts of the brain by fluctuating brain waves. Doctors can infer the approximate size of cysts or other lesions by detecting brain maps.
Dr Moore suffered from severe depression, and the diagnosis and treatment of Joshua Logan, a famous drama director in new york, was also his most successful case. Logan wrote in his memoirs that Meryl strode up to him when he was being treated and gave me an autograph. I didn’t read those, but I tried to stop him from reciting them to me. He always did this when he crossed the corridor or took the stairs. He told me that he would conceive his sonnets when he climbed the street or started the car. See Joshua Logan’s Josh Jsh, new york Delacorte, 1976.
According to his father’s notes, he left a recording tape for him to intervene in this matter. The clinical director of Maclean Psychiatric Hospital believed that people would negotiate to end carlotta’s marriage and imprison him. My father said that they were going to imprison him under the name of unwilling admission. The owner also told his father that carlotta was transferred from Salem Hospital near mable Head Town to Maclean Psychiatric Hospital. My father said that the couple had been living in mable Head Town. At first, she was mentally disordered because of bromide poisoning. My father, who was misdiagnosed as hysteria and admitted to hospital, said that O ‘Neill was also hospitalized during this period. After a big fight in carlotta, he accidentally broke his leg at his home in Head Town, mable. Dr. Moore induced O ‘Neill to sign the complaint claiming that carlotta was insane while he was still in Salem Hospital. His father said that his first meeting with O ‘Neill was at new york Doctor’s Hospital, where O ‘Neill was treating pneumonia.
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