Why I chose medicine I hardly know.
Possibly the career of a surgeon attracted the adventurous element
in me. Perhaps, coming of a family of doctors, I merely followed
the line of least resistance. It may be, indirectly but inevitably,
that I might be on the yacht Ella on that terrible night of August
12, more than a year ago.
I got through somehow. I played quarterback on the football team,
and made some money coaching. In summer I did whatever came to
hand, from chartering a sail-boat at a summer resort and taking
passengers, at so much a head, to checking up cucumbers in Indiana
for a Western pickle house.
I was practically alone. Commencement left me with a diploma, a
new dress-suit, an out-of-date medical library, a box of surgical
instruments of the same date as the books, and an incipient case
of typhoid fever.
I was twenty-four, six feet tall, and forty inches around the chest.
Also, I had lived clean, and worked and played hard. I got over the
fever finally, pretty much all bone and appetite; but--alive.
Thanks to the college, my hospital care had cost nothing. It was a
good thing: I had just seven dollars in the world.
The yacht Ella lay in the river not far from my hospital windows.
She was not a yacht when I first saw her, nor at any time,
technically, unless I use the word in the broad sense of a
pleasure-boat.
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