Читать книгу Lucille Teasdale - Deborah Cowley - Страница 13

2

A Doctor in the Marking

Everyone tried to discourage me from choosing surgery… They told me it was clearly a mans world and that no mother would ever put her child’s life in the hands of a woman surgeon. – Lucille Teasdale, 1956

Lucille Teasdale was born on 30 January 1929, the fourth in a family of five girls and two boys. They lived in Guybourg, a working-class neighbourhood in the east end of Montreal, where Lucille’s father, René, a butcher, owned and ran the first grocery store in the area. Actively involved in the community and in his Catholic church, he left Lucille’s mother, Juliette, with the job of raising their seven children.

Piero Corti, a young Italian doctor, comes to Montreal to study pediatrics.

Lucille obtains her medical diploma cum laude at the université de Montréal in 1955

Lucille preferred skating and playing hockey on a nearby rink to helping at home with household chores. Having such a boisterous tomboy for a daughter annoyed Juliette, who was obsessed with neatness and cleanliness and thought that all young girls should be obedient and feminine.

Lucille’s mother was a fragile woman who did her best to bring up her children according to her values. For most of her life, however, Juliette was given to long periods of depression. Lucille often noticed that her mother rarely smiled and always looked unhappy, but she was too young to understand why. Then one day, when Lucille returned from school, she overheard her mother confiding in a friend about her sadness. She had been so happy with her first three children, who were all girls, Juliette explained to her friend. But she desperately wanted a boy. When she was pregnant again, she prayed for a boy, but to her great disappointment, her fourth child was another girl. Lucille winced as she quickly realized she was that girl and the cause of her mothers unhappiness. She was devastated. From then on, she felt rejected by her mother, and the feeling haunted her for years.

Unlike her family and friends, Lucille loved school and worked hard at her studies. “None of them ever thought of studying,” she recalled years later. “They all wanted to leave school as soon as possible. The boys wanted to work in a factory and the girls wanted to work in Macdonald’s Tobacco.”

Lucille was twelve when her parents sent her to a strict convent high school in Montreal. One day, a group of missionary nuns visited the school. They had just returned from China, and they talked about their work in an orphanage looking after Chinese babies. Lucille was fascinated by the stories of their work. That very day she decided, “I want to help poor and needy children. I’m going to do that by becoming a doctor!”

The only person she told was her father. “A doctor?” he said. “Yes,” Lucille replied with certainty. “And I want to work in India.” Her father was stunned. None of his other children showed any interest even in finishing high school, and Lucille was talking about a career that would require many long years of study.

He was also aware that Montreal in the 1950s, like most of the province of Quebec, was a very conservative society. Career opportunities were limited, especially for women. Many chose to be nurses or teachers and some became nuns. He pointed out that it was almost unheard of for a woman to train as a doctor, a career traditionally reserved for men.

But Lucille was not deterred. “I want to be a doctor, so I will just have to find a way.”

Her father was clearly proud that she wished to continue her studies and did everything he could to help her. With his support, she studied even harder at school, managed to score top marks in her final examinations, and was awarded a bursary to attend Collège Jésus-Marie, one of the most prestigious classical colleges for women in Montreal, where she would complete high school. She was the only one in her family to do so.

At the college, Lucille met Dr. Jeanne Marcelle Dussault, a well-known woman doctor from Montreal who came to speak to the students. Lucille had already read about Dr. Dussault and was inspired by her example. Here is a woman, a French Canadian and a doctor, she thought. Having Dr. Dussault as a role model increased her determination to reach her goal.

With her mind fixed firmly on a medical career, Lucille continued to be a dedicated student. After four years at the college, she won a scholarship to enter the school of medicine at the Université de Montréal. She was twenty-one.

The day in September 1950 when Lucille first walked into the Université de Montréal’s medical school, she knew she was entering a man’s world. Still, she was astonished to discover that, in her class of 110 students, there were only eight women. Her father had been right, but even he was surprised. “Only eight?” he asked, incredulously.

“Yes, and this is a big year for women!” Lucille laughed.

Lucille was a keen and bright student. She was also strikingly attractive, tall and slender with wavy blonde hair and big brown eyes. In spite of her inferiority complex – she always thought others were better and brighter than she was – she was popular with her first year classmates, who elected her Miss Medicine. Others too noticed this bright young student: when the Quebec publication Le Petit Journal was looking for a university student to feature on its cover for the October 1951 edition, they chose a photo of the budding doctor Lucille Teasdale giving an injection to a rabbit!

In 1955, Lucille graduated from medical school cum laude. She had decided to specialize in surgery and began her internship at Ste-Justine’s children’s hospital in Montreal. She was the only woman in her class to choose surgery. She thought women were made for surgery, that it was women’s work – like sewing.

Few were convinced. All her friends tried to discourage her from choosing surgery. “Surgery is a man’s world,” one of them told her. Another took her aside and gave her an even stronger warning: “No mother would ever put her child’s life in the hands of a woman surgeon,” she said.

Lucille was determined to silence the sceptics. She would show her male colleagues that she was as good as they were. So she worked twice as hard, often for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Finally, after five gruelling years, she successfully completed her training and became one of Quebec’s first female surgeons.

Lucille was working at Ste-Justine’s when a friend introduced her to a young Italian doctor who had come to Montreal to study pediatrics. His name was Piero Corti. She took little notice of him at first, but he later approached her in the hospital corridor and reintroduced himself. Piero was a good-looking young man, short and stocky, with a sparkle in his eyes and an engaging smile. She found him charming and amusing to be with, and she couldn’t stop laughing at the way he spoke both French and English with a singsong Italian accent. But Lucille was so engrossed in her studies that she did not give him another thought. Piero, however, was immediately attracted by the beauty and intensity of this young intern.

The two came from very different backgrounds. Lucille had grown up in a working-class district of Montreal, while Piero was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer from Milan, the fifth in a family of ten. At school, Lucille strove to excel, but Piero preferred sports and fast motorbikes to homework. Despite their comfortable circumstances, Piero’s parents encouraged all their children to follow a profession, so he chose medicine and obtained a medical degree. He studied radiology and anesthesiology at the University of Milan.

Like Lucille, Piero was attracted by the idea of living and working in the Third World. One of his brothers was a Jesuit missionary in Chad, West Africa. A brother-in-law had served as a doctor, first in India and then in Africa. Their stories fascinated him and he was determined to follow in their footsteps.

Lucille had still to complete the final stage of her training. In order to practise as a surgeon, she needed one further diploma that required a period of training to be taken outside Canada. She sent letters to twenty top hospitals in the United States asking to be admitted to their surgical residence program. All twenty turned her down.

Lucille was absolutely furious. I have an excellent academic record and impressive credentials. It must he the fact I’m a woman that has ruined my chance of a job in the United States, she realized. She buried her anger and decided instead to apply for a job in France. She immediately received offers of positions in both Paris and Marseilles.

She chose Marseilles, a bustling Mediterranean seaport in the south of France. Now thirty-one years old, she said goodbye to her friends and family, and in September 1960, her father drove her to New York, where she boarded the S.S. Liberié.

After a five-day crossing, they reached the French port of Le Havre. Lucille boarded the train for the journey south. She grew increasingly excited as they flew past charming French villages with red-tiled roofs. As they moved south, she could feel the heat of the sun and marvelled at the luminescence of the countryside that so captivated Impressionist painters such as Van Gogh and Cézanne.

She caught her first sight of the Mediterranean when she reached Marseilles, a noisy and crowded city bordering the sea. She moved in with a French family and started work at once as an intern in pediatric surgery at the Hôpital de la Conception.

Lucille adjusted quickly to life in Marseilles. She made many new friends, but she was startled by their ignorance of Canada. “In Montreal, do you have snow ten months a year?” one of them asked. “Is there ever any sun? What language do you speak?” inquired another. They were very surprised when she told them that many Canadians living in Montreal speak French at school, at university, even in the shops. They were just as surprised when she told them that in summer, Montrealers grow tomatoes! They thought Montreal must always be much too cold.

She was amused to discover that the French spoken in France was different from the French she had learned in Canada. “The people here have difficulty understanding me because we have such different accents and different expressions,” she told her sister Lise. “Here, the children always call me ‘madam.’ At the hospital, the nurses call me ‘mademoiselle,’ the interns and several doctors call me ‘miss,’ and the boss, when he needs me, says ‘Go and find my Canadian.’”

Lucille’s plan was to spend eight months in Marseilles before heading to Paris to finish her internship there. She was so caught up in her new life that she thought little about the Italian doctor she had met at Ste-Justine’s. Meanwhile Piero had left Montreal to work first with his brother in Africa and later with a friend who ran a hospital in India. During his travels, Piero had thought often about his meeting with Lucille in Montreal, and they had exchanged a few letters. Now that he was back home in Italy, he decided to visit her in Marseilles.

One day, Lucille arrived home from the hospital and was surprised to find Piero waiting on her doorstep. “What are you doing here?” she asked. He looked a little sheepish as he explained: “You see, I have been thinking about you so often that I decided I would come and tell you all about my travels.”

He invited her for dinner in the Old Port of Marseilles. They chose a table by the waters edge where they could hear the sea lapping against the breakwater. Piero ordered bouillabaisse, the hearty fish soup that is a popular specialty of the region, and a bottle of wine. As they savoured the meal, he talked about his trip.

He had visited many different medical projects in Africa, both in Chad and in the Congo. He had also worked for a period in India. But it was during a visit to Uganda that he had made an exciting discovery. “A friend took me to the north of the country to see a small dispensary, St. Mary’s Hospital, near the village of Lacor,” he explained. “The clinic is tucked away in a remote corner of the region and has just forty beds. It is run by a dozen Italian missionary nuns, the Comboni sisters, who serve as nurses and midwives.” He paused, sipped some wine, and continued. “The minute I saw the facility, I knew this could be the answer to my dream to build a world-class hospital in a Third World country.”

Piero was also deeply moved by the beauty of Uganda, a country that was eagerly approaching its independence from Britain in 1962. He desrcibed his impressions to Lucille and talked about his plans to build a hospital that would provide specialized services to supplement those of the district hospital in nearby Gulu. “My fondest dream,” Piero added, wide-eyed with excitement, “is that, in time, this small hospital could become one of the best in Uganda and one that would be completely run by Africans.”

As he talked about his plans, Piero spoke faster and faster. “I know that what I am talking about is a gigantic task, but I feel certain that, with Gods help, I can make it happen.” On the more practical side, he believed that he could handle all the administrative duties of the new facility. He could recruit doctors from Italy and train nurses locally. “But most important of all,” he added, “I need someone with experience in surgery.”

There was a long, silent pause as Piero braced himself to pose the question: “Lucille, why don’t you come to Uganda and help out in the hospital for two or three months?”

Lucille was stunned. She hardly knew Piero and she knew almost nothing about Uganda. As the meal progressed, Piero’s childlike enthusiasm became infectious. “I will even offer to pay your airfare plus money for cigarettes and toothpaste,” he said.

Lucille laughed. “You are very, very persistent.”

Piero left for Milan and Lucille pondered the idea of joining him in Africa. She was enjoying her life in Marseilles and was anxious to complete her course. But she found herself thinking more and more about Piero’s offer. Here was the chance to live out her childhood ambition to be a doctor in the Third World. She suddenly found herself thinking, Why not?

As Christmas approached, Piero telephoned her from Milan and asked her to join his family for the festive season. Lucille saw this as a good chance to get to know him better before making a final decision. She was also curious to meet his family. He had spoken of them often and appeared to enjoy an especially close relationship with his parents, something she had lacked in her own childhood. Just before Christmas, she boarded the train for Milan.

Piero met her at the railway station and they travelled together to Besana in Brianza, the town where his parents lived, an hour’s drive from Milan. As they approached the family home, she couldn’t believe her eyes: their house was a huge mansion standing on vast grounds ringed with palm trees. The interior was even more lavish, with large family portraits lining the walls and maids in frilly white aprons floating from room to room.

Piero’s family welcomed her warmly, curious about this new arrival. In her presence, they all spoke to her in French or English, then among themselves switched effortlessly into Italian. Though they could not have been more welcoming, Lucille couldn’t stop thinking about her own modest upbringing in the east end of Montreal, and she felt uncomfortable and out of place.

The next night, Piero took her to a performance of the ballet Cinderella at La Scala, the world-famous opera house in Milan. She was overwhelmed by the opulence of the auditorium, its five semicircular tiers of boxes reaching upwards to the ornate ceiling. They sat, as if in a dream, watching the fairy-tale story unfold. At intermission, as Piero poured a glass of champagne, Lucille cast aside any misgivings and told him: “Yes, I will join you in Uganda. But I must make it clear that it is only for a month or two.” They raised their glasses in a toast to the future.

Lucille returned to Marseilles and prepared to leave for Africa.