Читать книгу The Story of Dr. Wassell - James Hilton - Страница 4
ОглавлениеFOREWORD
CORYDON WASSELL was born on July 4 (a good date), 1884, at Little Rock, Arkansas—a good place that can also claim Douglas MacArthur as one of its sons. The Wassell family came originally from Kidderminster, England, and the "Corydon" came from well, nobody seems to know.
Young Cory enjoyed a mixed education and a wandering youth; he did not decide on a profession till he was twenty-two. Then he studied at Johns Hopkins, after which he graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1909 and began practising in the small Arkansas village of Tillar.
For the next five years he faced the usual struggles, problems, and hardships of a young doctor, but he was a gay sort of fellow, fond of a good time and a good story, and by no means depressed by a world in which the desires of the few so manifestly outweigh the needs of the many. He did, however, find himself taking sides in it—rather as Moliére's M. Jourdain found himself talking prose in it—with a naïve unawareness that anything so natural to him could be given a name. But it could, and doubtless was; and meanwhile he went his own way, working hard, enjoying life, and acquiring considerable popularity among those who could not pay their bills. Two things he did are worth special mention: he organized a sort of group-medicine scheme for Negro workers, and he married a village schoolteacher.
One day in 1913 the President of Suchow University came to Tillar and talked in the Episcopal Church about the needs of China. After the meeting the doctor found himself taking sides again—the same side, actually, though at the other side of the world. His wife being in full agreement, they both left Arkansas as prospective missionaries a few months later to make a new home at Wuchang, on the Yangtze River. Here the doctor studied Chinese, worked in the hospital at Boone University, and raised a family.
Except for a short furlough in 1919 (during which his fourth child, a son, was born at Little Rock), Dr. Wassell spent in all a dozen years in China. Four of them were European War years—all of them were Chinese war years. He did a great many things during this time. He learned to love the Chinese people, and to derive a great personal happiness from being among them; he diagnosed, treated, and operated at hospitals; he took a course in neurology at Peking Medical College and studied parasitology at Hunan Yale; he published articles on encephalitis in medical journals and examined thousands of snails in a search for the carrier of amoebic dysentery; he taught Chinese students, both in Chinese and in English; he mixed well with American and English residents, and had no trouble in avoiding religious friction with Buddhists and Catholics. He was perhaps every other inch a missionary. Presently he resigned from the society and took on the triple tasks of port doctor at Kukiang, consultant in a Catholic hospital, and a private practice; there were changes too in his personal life, for his wife had died, and he married again—an American missionary-nurse (his present wife); and all the time he was intermittently mixed up with war and revolution as well as with disease and pestilence, so that he served with equal readiness a Chinese army at the front and a British Consulate in a besieged concession...a busy, varied, arduous career, confusing only if you look at it as anything but that of a man trying to be of constant use during times and in a country both confusing and confused.
(And—significantly for what happened later—he joined the U. S. Naval Reserve.)
In 1927 confusion, reaching a climax, drove him home—back to Little Rock, where he had another fling at private practice and earned just enough in the first six months to pay his office rent. Soon, however, a county job fell to him, and this was much better—that of organizing and officering a public health system in the schools. But once again—and again with something of M. Jourdain's unawareness—the doctor found himself a pioneer. This time, in addition to the Negro, there was the Catholic, and the man of any race or religion who couldn't afford a two-dollar fee for immunization against a diphtheria epidemic. Dr. Wassell championed them all—not as a crusader, but as a public-health official who very simply believed it was his duty to safeguard public health.
Then came the Depression, when dollars were even scarcer and diseases even more plentiful. Malaria spread in parts of Arkansas, and on account of his Chinese experience Dr. Wassell was given the job of fighting it in local CCC camps, one of which was established in quarterboats on the Mississippi and nicknamed "the CCC Navy." Here he made many young friends and was almost as happy as he had been in China.
But there was another Navy that he had not forgotten and that had not forgotten him. In 1936, at the age of fifty-two, he resumed regular commissioned duty, and 1940 (the CCC era ended) saw him at Key West, serving on a submarine inspection board and wondering if the Navy would think him too old for a real job if a real war emergency should arise.
The blurred line of destiny becomes a little clearer now. In September 1941 he was ordered to Cavite, and was to have sailed from San Francisco on the morning of December 7. That sailing was delayed, and that destination changed. It had to be Java instead—and at the end of January.
On February 4 the cruisers Houston and Marblehead were in action off the Java coast. Badly battered by a much heavier Japanese force, they yet managed to limp into port, and Dr. Wassell, just arrived on the island, was among those detailed to take care of many wounded men.
"Dr. Wassell," said the President in a broadcast speech to the nation on the twenty-eighth of April, 1942, "remained with these men, knowing that he would be captured by the enemy. But he decided to make a desperate attempt to get the men out of Java. He asked each of them if he wished to take the chance and every one agreed. He first had to get the twelve men to the seacoast. The men were suffering severely, but Dr. Wassell kept them alive by his skill and inspired them by his own courage. As the official report said, Dr. Wassell was 'almost like a Christ-like shepherd devoted to his flock.'"
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