The Doctor Takes a Wife Read Free

demands. But I ’ m quite sure your best line concerning my profession will be never to say one word about it to outsiders.”
    She sighed and straightened her shoulders, looked down the trail, then slid one ski tentatively forward. “Play dumb,” she said thoughtfully.
    “Play smart. You ’ ll see—it ’ ll be lots easier that way.”
    She cast him a cold, flashing smile, and started down the little slope directly before them. “It ’ s only fair to tell you,” she called over her shoulder, “that when I have my baby—I ’ ll go to the city—not be at the mercy of a bunch of country doctors!” She made an impudent, laughing face at him across her shoulder, and soared off and away.
    He chuckled, set his skis and followed her, his body perfectly responding to the demands which he put upon it, his muscles working like silk—and his thoughts back in town, with his hospital—the clinic. The brick and stucco building—the “plant”—and the staff, the job they did.
    Many newspaper and magazine write-ups had called it the “little Mayo ’ s of the West.” Sometimes it was spoken of as the answer to socialized medicine. In any case, the Berry and Chappell Clinic was a thriving institution, owned by the doctors who operated it, and serving an average of 10,000 patients a year. That ’ s a lot in the mountains—or anywhere.
    The hospital offered nine qualified specialists in as many fields. The standards were kept high. Dr. Chappell, still with the hospital, and Dr. Berry—long since dead—had started the hospital in 1905. They had set certain ideals and maintained them. Succeeding members of the staff were selected with those goals in mind.
    I came to Berry and Chappell directly after the War as a resident physician, and I am still proud that I was allowed to buy into the place, to qualify in my specialty and to work there. Scoles, I know, felt the same way about the clinic.
    The idea behind the institution was a beautifully simple one. People, even those in the mountains, needed medical care. The constant increase of medical knowledge made specialist care the best sort. It was a logical step, therefore, to collect a group of specialists into one organization.
    Our staff doctors must be qualified specialists, and they must continue to study in their specialty. Our equipment was of the best that could be bought. We were not alone in this development. There were at least four hundred group-practice units in the United States, ranging from staffs of three to two hundred and fifty doctors. The average group had eight. Ours had nine, with the hope of getting two more. We badly needed an E.E.T. man and an orthopedist.
    The one thing that made our set-up out of the ordinary was that such a place should be available in the middle of the Sawtooth Mountains where, without us, medical care would be distant and infrequent, not to say incompetent. But with us there, the people who dwelt in our mountains could come to us for emergency care, or for what we liked much better, regular examination, diagnosis and treatment. Our ideal was preventive medicine, and we went a long way toward realizing it.
    The clinic was a money-maker, but I felt—and I think Phil did—that no member of our staff was the sort of medic who had taken up the profession for its remunerative rewards. Medicine, in any form, is a back-breaking, heart-twisting task before it becomes remunerative in any sense. If money is a doctor ’ s total motivation, sincere condolences are due him, and his patients.
    Doctors, as a class, run no better, no worse, than other men. But when you are organizing a group, it is always possible to select men of integrity—and I think that idea was pretty well attained at Berry and Chappell. To the point that the occasional misfit did not stay long with us.
    Phil realized this, without ever needing to put the matter into concrete thoughts—until Marynelle ’ s attack made him do it. He ’ d not had to explain it to