Fall after the Pride...
Morris Hirsch's immediate thrill of qualifying in November of 1938 was stifled within a day!
Morris Hirsch's immediate thrill when qualifying in November of 1938 was stifled within a day! There were no housemanships (internships) available for about half the graduates. He had no influence with the 'chiefs'. His final year grades were modest. He was outside the 'club' (many of the houseman jobs had been bespoken months before).
He was however fortunate to be offered a three week locum in a non-European medical ward for a houseman going on vac. He'd begin on Jan 1st 1939.
He was in control of forty or so patients, making diagnoses, determining therapy and giving orders. He'd arrived. But was it real?
Soon results were dissapointing and doubts set in. He even came to doubt the profession's ability to cope with disease. The Black patients were all very ill. There were always too many. There were no quick-fix cures then. Patients recovered mainly on the strength of their own immune response, which took time. Or they lingered and died.
Some patients had to be accommodated on the floor. The Whites in the European hospital across the road were admitted at a much earlier stage of illness and were mostly in a better state of nutritional health. At the Non-European hospital he was up against serious and advanced pathology. He was soon at his wit's end, especially to stem the 25%+ death rate of pneumonia patients and higher rate of typhoid mortality. Those were still the pre-antibiotic days. The visiting 'Chiefs' and consulting physicians in private practice were not of much help. Morris worked hard and long hours. He had to be content mainly with relief of suffering rather than cure.
Before he could adjust and settle into the demanding challenge, the three weeks had flown. He'd earned £3/10. He was sorry to hand over and believed the surviving patients regretted his going.
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
Excerpt from Dr. Morris Isaac Hirsch's Unpublished Memoir: Hirsch Archives.
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