"Leinster, Murray - The Strange Case of John Kingman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)
IT STARTED WHEN Dr. Braden took the trouble to look up John Kingman's case-history card. Meadeville Mental Hospital had a beautifully elaborate system of card indexes, because psychiatric research is stressed there. It is the oldest mental institution in the country, having been known as "New Bedlam" when it was founded some years before the Republic of the United States of America. The card index system was unbelievably perfect. But young Dr. Braden found John Kingman's card remarkably lacking in the usual data.
"Kingman, John," said the card. "White, male, 5'8", brown-black hair. Note: physical anomaly. Patient has six fingers on each hand, extra digits contaming apparently normal bones and being wholly functional. Age . . ." This was blank. "Race . . ." This, too, was blank. "Birthplace " Considering the other blanks, it was natural for this to be vacant, also. "Diagnosis: advanced typical paranoia with pronounced delusions of grandeur apparently unassociated with usual conviction of persecution." There was a comment here, too. "Patient apparently understands English very slightly if at all. Does not speak." Then three more spaces. "Nearest relative . . ." It was blank. "Case history . . ." It was blank. Then, "Date of admission . . ." and it was blank.
The card was notably defective, for the index card of a patient at Meadeville Mental. A patient's age and race could be unknown if he'd simply been picked up in the street somewhere and never adequately identified. In such an event it was reasonable that his nearest relative and birthplace should be unknown, too. But there should have been some sort of case history, at least of the events leading to his committal to the institution. And certainly, positively, absolutely, the date of his admission should be on the card!
Young Dr. Braden was annoyed. This was at the time when the Jantzen euphoric-shock treatment was first introduced, and young Dr. Braden believed in it. It made sense. He was anxious to attempt it at Meadeville, of course on a patient with no other possible hope of improvement. He handed the card to the clerk in the records department and asked for further data on the case.
Two hours later he smoked comfortably on a very foul pipe, stretched out on grassy sward by the Administration Building. There was a beautifully blue sky overhead, and the shadows of the live oaks reached out in an odd long pattern on the lawn. Young Dr. Braden read meditatively in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The article was "Reaction of Ten Paranoid Cases to Euphoric Shock." John Kingman sat in regal dignity on the steps nearby. He wore the nondescript garments of an indigent patient, not supplied with clothing by relatives. He gazed into the distance, to all appearances thinking consciously godlike thoughts and being infinitely superior to mere ordinary humans. He was of an indeterminate age which might be forty or might be sixty or might be anywhere in between. His six-fingered hands lay in studied gracefulness in his lap. He deiberately ignored all of mankind and mankind's doings.
Dr. Braden finished the article. He sucked thoughtfully on the burned-out pipe. Without seeming to do so, he regarded John Kingman again. Mental cases have unpredictable reactions, but as with children and will animals, much can be done if care is taken not to startle them. Presently young Dr. Braden said meditatively:
"John, I think something can be done for you"
The regal figure turned its eyes. They looked at the younger man. They were aloofly amused at the imperitinence of a mere human being addressing John Kingman, who was so much greater than a mere human being that he was not even annoyed at human impertinence. Then John Kingman looked away again.
"I imagine," said Braden, as meditatively as before, "that you're pretty bored. I'm going to see if something can't be done about it. In fact-"
Someone came across the grass toward him. It was the clerk of the records department. He looked very unhappy. He hadthe card Dr. Braden had turned in with a request for more complete information. Braden waited.
"Er . . doctor," said the clerk miserably, "there's something wrong! Something terribly wrong! About the records, I mean."
The aloofness of John Kingman had multiplied with the coming of a second, low, human being into his ken. He gazed into the distance in divine indifference to such creatures.
"Well?" said Braden.
"There's no record of his admission!" said the clerk. "Every year there's a complete roster of the patients, you know. I thought I'd just glance back, find out what year his name first appeared, and look in the committal papers for that year. But I went back twenty years, and John Kingman is mentioned every year!"
"Look back thirty, then," said Braden.
"I . . . I did!" said the clerk painfully. "He was a patient here thirty years ago!"
"Forty?" asked Braden.
The clerk gulped.
"Dr. Braden," he said desperately, "I even went to the dead files, where records going back to 1850 are kept. And . . . doctor, he was a patient then!"
Braden got up from the grass and brushed himself off automatically.
"Nonsense!" he said. "That's ninety-eight years ago!"
The clerk looked crushed. "I know, doctor. There's something terribly wrong! I've never had my records questioned before. I've been here twenty years."
"Y-yes, doctor," said the clerk, gulping again. "At... at once."
He went away at a fast pace between a shuffle and a run. Dr. Braden scowled impatiently.
Then he saw John Kingman looking at him again, and John Kingmрn was amused. Tolerantly, loftily amused. Amused with a patronizing condescension that would have been infuriating to anyone but a physician trained to regard behavior as symptomatic rather than personal.
"It's absurd," grunted Braden, matter of factly treating the patient, as a good psychiatrist does, like a perfectly normal human being. "You haven't been here for ninety-eight years!"
One of the six-fingered hands stirred. While John Kingman regarded Braden with infinitely superior scorn, six fingers made a gesture as of writing. Then the hand reached out.
Braden put a pencil in it. The other hand reached. Braden fumbled in his pockets and found a scrap of paper. He offered that.
John Kingman looked aloofly into the far distance, not even glancing at what his hands did. But the fingers sketched swiftly, with practiced ease. It took only seconds. Then, negligently, he reached out and returned pencil and paper to Braden. He returned to his godlike indifference to mere mortals. But there was now the faintest possible smile on his face. It was an expression of contemptuous triumph.
Braden glanced at the sketch. There was design there. There was an unbelievable intricacy of relationship between this curved line and that, and between them and the formalized irregular pattern in the center. It was not the drawing of a lunatic. It was cryptic, but it was utterly rational. There is something essentially childish in the background of most forms of insanity. There was nothing childish about this. And it was obscurely, annoyingly familiar. Braden had seen something like it, somewhere, before. It was not in the line of psychiatry, but in some of the physical sciences diagrams like this were used in explanations.
An attendant came to return John Kingman to his ward. Braden folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
"It's not in my line, John," he told John Kingman. "I'll have a check-up made. I think I'm going to be able to do something for you."
John Kingman suffered himself to be led away. Rather, he grandly preceded the attendant, negligently preventing the man from touching him, as if such a touch Would be a sacrilege the man was too ignorant to realize.
Braden went to the record office. With the agitated clerk beside him, he traced John Kingman's name to the earliest of the file of dead records. Handwriting succeeded typewriting as he went back through the years. Paper yellowed. Handwriting grew Spencerian. It approached the copperplate. But, in ink turned brown, in yellowed rag paper in the ruled record, books of the Eastern Pennsylvania Asylum, which was Meadeville Mental in 1850, there were the records of a patient named John Kingman for every year. Twice Braden came upon notes alongside the name. One was in 1880. Some staff doctor, there were no psychiatrists in those days, had written, "High fever." There was nothing else. In 1853 a neat memo stood beside the name. "This man has six functioning fingers on each hand." The memo had been made ninety-five years before.
Dr. Braden looked at the agitated clerk. The record of John Kingman was patently impossible. The clerk read it as a sign of inefficiency in his office and possibly on his part. He would be upset and apprehensible until the source of the error had safely been traced to a predecessor.
"Someone," said Braden dryly, but he did not believe it even then, "forgot to make a note of the explanation. An unknown must have been admitted at some time as John Kingman. In time, he died. But somehow the name John Kingman had become a sort of stock name like John Doe, to signify an unidentified patient. Look in the death records for John Kingman. Evidently a John Kingman died, and that same year another unidentified patient was assigned the same name. That's it!"
The clerk almost gasped with relief. He went happily to check. But Braden did not believe it. In 1853 someone had noted that John Kingman had six functioning fingers on each hand. The odds against two patients in one institution having six functioning fingers, even in the same century, would be enormous.
Braden went doggedly to the museum. There the devices used in psychiatric treatments in the days of New Bedlam were preserved, but not displayed. Meadeville Mental had been established in 1776 as New Bedlam. It was the oldest mental institution in the United States, but it was not pleasant to think of the treatment given to patients, then termed "madmen", in the early days.
The records remained. Calf-leather bindings. Thin rag paper. Beautifully shaded writing, done with quill pens. Year after year, Dr. Braden searched. He found John Kingman listed in 1820. In 1801. In 1795. In 1785 the name "John Kingthan" was absent from the annual list of patients. Braden found the record of his admission in 1786. On the 21st of May, 1786, ten years after New Bedlam was founded, one hundred and sixty-two years before the time of his search, there was a neat entry:
A poore madman admitted this day has been assigned the name of John Kingman because of his absurdly royal manner and affected dignity. He is five feet eight inches tall, appears to speak no English or any other tongue known to any of the learned men here about, and has six fingers on each hand, the extra fingers being perfectly formed and functioning. Dr. San Forde observed that he seems to have a high fever. On his left shoulder, when stripped, there appears a curious design which is not tattooing according to any known fashion. His madness appears to be so strong a conviction of his greatness that he will not condescend to notice others as being so much his inferiors, so that if not committed hee would starve. But on three occasions, when being examined by physicians, he put out his hand imperiously for writing instruments, and drew very intricate designs which all agree have no significance. He was committed as a madman by a commission consisting of Drs. San Forde, Smyth, Hale, and Bode."
Young Dr. Braden read the entry a second time. Then a third. He ran his hands through his hair. When the clerk came back to announce distressedly that not in all the long history of the institution had a patient named John Kingman died, Braden was not surprised.
"Quite right," said Braden to the almost hysterical clerk. "He didn't die. But I want John Kingman taken over to the hospital ward. We're going to look him over. He's been rather neglected. Apparently he's had actual medical attention only once in a hundred and sixty-two years. Get out his committal papers for me, will you? He was admitted here May 21st, 1786."
Then Braden left, leaving behind him a clerk practically prostrated with shock. The clerk wildly suspected that Dr. Braden had gone insane. But when he found the committal papers, he decided hysterically that it was he who would shortly hold in one of the wards.
John Kingman manifested amusement when he was taken into the hospital laboratory. For a good ten seeonds, Braden watched him narrowly, he glanced from one piece of apparatus to another. It was impossible to doubt that after one glance he understood the function and operation of every appliance in the ultramodern, super, scientifically, equipped laboratory of the hospital ward. Bnt he was amused. In particular, he looked at the big X-ray machine and smiled with such contempt that the X-ray technician bristled.
"No paranoid suspicion," said Braden. "Most paranoid patients suspect that they're going to be tortured or killed when they're brought to a place where there's stuff they don't understand."
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