O God, what should I do? Ida prayed to herself. She knew that the woman, her first patient, was near death. The woman was beyond help, but if Ida stayed with her till she died, word would get around that she could not save the woman. She debated whether to stay or go. But who was going to make this pitiful woman comfortable in her dying hour? Ida realized she had to stay and make the best of the situation.
She called for the man of the house and explained to him that there was nothing she could do to save this woman’s life, but if he would let her, she would stay and make her comfortable. Ida knew of the local custom that did not allow a sick person to have water or fresh air, and she wanted the woman to have both.
Much to Ida’s surprise, the man summoned the old woman’s three daughters-in-law from somewhere deep within the house and told them to do whatever Missy Ammal told them to. This was all Ida needed to hear. She ordered the younger women to carry their mother-in-law out of the stifling room and into a shaded part of the courtyard. Then she asked for water, which was brought to her. Ida dripped some of the cool liquid into the old woman’s mouth and then wet her handkerchief and sponged her off.
While Ida was doing this, the old woman lay with her eyes wide open, following Ida’s every move. Ida continued to dip her handkerchief in water and sponge the old woman as the minutes turned into hours. Finally Ida needed to stretch herself. As she stood up, the old woman pulled on her dress. Ida looked down to see the woman roll onto her stomach and edge her way down the mat until she was level with Ida’s feet. Then, in a supreme effort, the old woman lifted her face and kissed Ida’s feet. Ida jumped back.
“No, no!” she exclaimed. Then she knelt down again and looked into the old woman’s eyes. There was a sign of recognition, and then nothing. The act of rising to kiss Ida’s feet had been the woman’s last act.
The three younger women crowded around Ida as she shut the old woman’s eyes and placed the handkerchief gently over her face.
Quietly Ida stood up and walked across the courtyard toward the main door. The women crowded in around her.
“You come back and see us. Please. Please. You are our friend. Don’t forget you are our friend,” they said.
Ida looked at them. “I will come back and see you,” she promised, confident that she had indeed made her first real friends in Vellore.
Chapter 8
The Mary Taber Schell Memorial Hospital
Ida and her father were bicycling quietly along the path that led back to the Reformed Church’s missionary guest house in Kodaikanal, a popular resort town in the hills above Madras. It was May, and Ida was glad for a break from the sweltering heat of the plains below. She knew she needed a rest, and her father needed one even more. Ida was concerned about his health. In some ways he did seem better, but he was plagued with large boils that left him weak and sore.
The two of them had just turned a corner when Mr. Scudder’s front wheel bumped against a tree root. In an instant Ida’s father shot over the handlebars and onto the path. Ida jumped off her bicycle and ran to his aid. She took his hands to help him up, but he could not summon the strength to get to his feet.
“Just lie there,” Ida said. “You don’t need to move. Someone will be along to help us in a minute.”
Ida ran her hands over her father’s legs and arms, but she could not feel any broken bones. She examined his head, but he had not hit it when he fell.
“I am sorry to spoil your fun,” her father said as he lay on the ground.
Within a minute or two, a group of young men came riding along, and they rushed to help. Between them they made a makeshift stretcher and carried John Scudder back to the guest house.
Mrs. Scudder ran out to see what all the commotion was about. With her usual efficiency, she cleared the furniture out of the way so that her husband could be laid on his bed.
Ida’s cousin, Dr. Lew Scudder, who was also staying at the house, grabbed his medical bag and asked everyone except Ida to leave the room. Ida shut the door gently just as her cousin was taking off her father’s shirt. Ida and Lew both let out a gasp at the same moment. John Scudder had lumps as large as golf balls under both arms.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Ida exclaimed.
“I didn’t want to be a bother,” her father responded, “what with you starting out in your work. You have plenty more important things to worry about. It’s probably nothing serious.”
Ida and Lew looked at each other. Even though Ida was a new doctor, she was convinced she was looking at a very serious condition—cancer—and she was sure her father knew it too.
Together the two cousins made Dr. Scudder comfortable, and then Lew signaled for Ida to meet him outside.
“We must operate now,” Lew said as soon as the two of them were out of the elder doctor’s hearing.
“But we can’t,” Ida replied. “The nearest hospital is in Madura. He would never survive the trip there.”
“Then we’ll do it here,” Lew replied. “It’s the only chance he has.”
Ida felt her mouth go dry. “Do you think so?” she asked. “Is it that serious?”
Ida’s cousin did not say a word but just nodded his head.
The next five days were agony for Ida as she waited for the correct operating equipment to be sent from the nearest hospital. The operation was scheduled for noon, when the best light was available, and the veranda was prepared as an operating room.
Ida grew more nervous as the time for the operation approached. Lew was going to do the operating while Ida and her brother Walter and sister-in-law Nell took charge of sterilizing the equipment and handing it to Lew.
Finally noon came, and all of the sheets and dressings had been boiled and dried over the woodstove. Lew, Ida, Walter, and Nell all put on operating gowns, and Lew held a chloroform cloth over John’s nose, rendering him unconscious.
Ida’s medical training helped her focus, and she automatically did what her cousin asked, handing him a scalpel and other instruments and holding out a pan for him to place the cancerous growths in.
“It’s not good,” Lew said after operating on Ida’s father’s right armpit. “The growth is large, and I don’t think I can get it all.”
Still, the four of them labored on together. Sadly, Lew was even less optimistic about removing the growth in the other armpit. He removed what he could and quickly sewed up the incision.
“All we can do is wait and pray,” he said as he snipped the last suture.
Ida stood by numbly watching her father. Was it possible that he was really dying? The idea seemed outrageous to her, like some nightmare from which she would soon awaken.
After a few moments Ida’s father stirred. He opened his eyes. “O, Master, let the light go out,” he murmured and then lapsed into unconsciousness.
They were the last words he ever spoke. He lay quietly for a few more hours and then stopped breathing.
The entire town of Kodaikanal was shocked. It seemed impossible that they had lost their beloved Dr. Scudder, but no one was more devastated than Ida. Her father was her mentor, the man who was showing her the way to treat tropical diseases and relate to the Indian people. And she had worked with him for only five months. It didn’t seem fair. How could she go on without him?
The next day Dr. John Scudder II was buried in the Kodaikanal cemetery. Ida barely heard the many eulogies that were spoken at the service; she was lost in her grief, stunned at how quickly her father had died.
The following weeks passed in a haze. Somehow Ida and her mother returned to Vellore, though Ida could not bear to open her father’s clinic. She missed him too much. Besides, she knew she did not have the medical experience she needed to work alone.
As the days rolled by, Ida began to imagine a modest clinic for herself. She and Annie opened one of the front rooms in the house and spread the word that Ida would see patients there until the hospital was opened in a few months, when Dr. Louisa Hart would move to Vellore to run it.
On the first morning the clinic was open, Ida had everything ready by eight o’clock. The house girl, Salomi, had neatly lined up the medicines on shelves, bandages were rolled, and Ida’s medical tools were laid out on a white sheet on the table. Ida waited until noon, but no one came. Nor did anyone come the following day or the day after that. In fact, two weeks went by, and not a single patient showed up at the clinic. Ida double-checked with the butler and the stable hand to make sure they had spread the word that things were “back to normal” at the mission house. But in reality they were not. There was no male doctor there anymore, and no one appeared to want to be Ida’s first patient.
Ida was so frustrated with the situation that she cried herself to sleep many nights during this time. She wondered what use a hospital in Vellore would be if her father was not there to run it. It seemed that women doctors could not inspire confidence in a land like India.
A break finally came when a bandy pulled up in the driveway. From the back of the cart stepped a woman clad in an expensive silk sari. Her eyes were bandaged, and a young girl led her by the hand up the steps of the clinic.
Ida’s heart jumped. “Please, God,” she prayed, “let this be something simple that I can cure.”
With more confidence than she felt, Ida welcomed the woman into the clinic and unwrapped the bandages. The woman’s eyes were red and weeping with yellow pus.
“Thank you, God,” Ida said as she poured some boric solution from a bottle to bathe the woman’s eyes. “You have conjunctivitis. I am going to put some drops in your eyes, and you will need to return every morning for a week for more drops. Then you will be cured. Do you understand?” she said to the woman.
The woman repeated the instructions back to Ida and then left.
Once the woman was gone, Ida realized that in her excitement at finally having a patient, she had forgotten to ask the woman her name or address. Now she had no way of following up if the woman did not return to the clinic. The next morning, however, the woman did show up, and she brought with her another woman with the same eye problem.
By the end of the week, both women were better, and other patients, both men and women, began to come to the clinic. Before long Ida was very busy, so busy, in fact, that she began praying for a Tamil-speaking assistant. Annie did what she could to help, but by now she was occupied visiting the local women in their homes.
As it turned out, the answer to Ida’s prayer was right in front of her. Ida had noticed that the house girl, Salomi Benjamin, was finding excuses to spend time around the clinic and that she had picked up a lot of information about medicines from watching Ida dispense them. Unlike most Indian girls, Salomi could read and write Tamil and speak English. Ida approached her about working full-time in the clinic. Salomi’s eyes sparkled with delight at the idea, and soon she and Ida were an inseparable team.
In the meantime the new forty-bed hospital was slowly emerging from the red dust of Vellore. Named the Mary Taber Schell Memorial Hospital after Robert Schell’s wife, the cornerstone for the structure was laid on September 7, 1901. One year later the building was opened with great pomp and ceremony.
At the opening, crowds of people clamored to see the strange white wrought-iron beds with wire-spring bases and thick mattresses. They had never seen anything like it before. Nor had they ever seen anything like the shiny operating room, complete with autoclave and glass-topped table.
The hospital was divided into two parts. The first, a large open ward, was for poor patients who could not afford to pay for their stay. The second part of the hospital was for patients from higher castes who could not mix with the poor lower-caste patients or even eat food from the kitchen that served the rest of the hospital. The rooms for high-caste patients had their own cooking stoves so that a family member could prepare food for the patient.
Within days of opening, the hospital began to fill up with sick and dying patients. Unfortunately, Dr. Louisa Hart, the woman who had suggested the hospital in the first place, was not there to help Ida. She had become sick and had returned to the United States to recuperate. This was a blow to Ida, who still desperately missed her father and had been counting on Louisa to run the hospital.
