Pharmakon Read Free

Friedrich augmented the tests by asking patients who were under local anesthesia a series of simple, mathematical questions while the scalpel was cutting into their frontal lobe.
    “What’s one plus one? Two plus three? Count backward from a hundred.” He could still see the face of the teenage girl with curly black hair who had been sentenced to neurosurgery by her parents. When Mom and Dad found out she had contracted syphilis at Wellesley, they had sent her to a state mental health facility. Shortly after her arrival, she had attempted suicide.
    “Eighty-eight, 87, 86, 8 . . .” Will could still hear that girl counting down the last seconds she had to be herself, then gasping a sigh and mumbling, “What comes next?”
    Friedrich’s findings did not make him popular among those PhDs and MDs at Yale who were on the lobotomy bandwagon. Will knew it was just a matter of time before the numbers he and others came up with put the lobotomists out of business. But that didn’t make him feel any less guilty for having interrogated a teenager on simple math while someone broke into her brain and stole her soul. Friedrich hadn’t performed the operation, or ordered it, or put her in a loony bin. He hadn’t cut into her head—it would have happened even if he hadn’t been there. But he had watched it happen and done nothing to stop it. And that bothered him.
    Throwing off his overcoat and kicking off his galoshes, Will slumped into his desk chair. There were a half dozen different research projects he could have started. He had toyed with the idea of doing studies on foster children, senility, and a half dozen other dark corners of health care that could have benefited from the spotlight of his mind, but Friedrich’s ego couldn’t shake the vain notion that somewhere in him was a big idea that could make the world a saner place.
    As he reached for a yellow pad to make notes, a pencil fell off his desk. It was an early Christmas gift from the head of the department. Embossed on the pencil were the words “Publish or Perish.” Friedrich snapped it in two, pulled on a leaky boot, and reached for his overcoat.
    Will ran toward the exit. As he headed out the front door the janitor called out, “Where are you off to in such a hurry, Dr. Friedrich?”
    “Christmas shopping for my kids.”
    “I’m glad somebody in here has some sense.”

    Feeling like an escapee from an institution, Friedrich whistled along to the Salvation Army band on Main Street and spun himself through the revolving doors of the first department store he came to. He had no trouble finding the children’s department, and the robotic reindeer that pranced across the rooftops of a gingerbread palace worthy of the “Mad” King Ludwig was impressive. But the toys depressed him.
    Gifts he could afford were either made of plastic or looked like they’d been sewn together by a sweatshop worker wearing mittens. There were big-ticket items he didn’t have the money for but would have loved to find under his Christmas tree, even if he were a girl, like a chemistry set claiming to contain “everything needed to perform real scientific experiments at home”: a crystal-radio kit, complete with its own soldering iron. But when he opened the box all he found was an assortment of chemicals available under your average kitchen sink, a nickel’s worth of wire, some pegboard, and a soldering iron guaranteed to set off an electrical fire.
    A saleswoman tapped him on the shoulder. “You opened the box.”
    “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see what was inside.”
    “It says what’s inside right on the plastic wrapper.”
    “Yeah, but I wanted to see for myself.”
    “Well, you have, and that will be $8.54.”

    Will Friedrich was in the bar of the faculty club now, self-medicating with a beer, trying to think what his mother called “pleasant thoughts,” i.e., trying to cheer himself up before he boarded the streetcar home. He felt contagious. Self-absorbed