Medicine: Saturday Night

"Take me, God Almighty, please take me. I don't want to live no more. Why should I live to be tortured?"

On an examination table in Chicago's huge Cook County Hospital, a 70-year-old woman lay limply, pleading for death between long, painful gasps. Her fingernails were blue. She was critically ill of congestive heart failure. The woman's brother, a wizened little Irishman with a patch over one eye, stood beside the table explaining why he had let her go so long without medical attention. "I thought it would pass, and I didn't want to leave her," he said. "I wanted to keep her at home as long as possible." The cop who had driven them to the hospital in the middle of the night grunted: "People got no regard."

Dr. Ed Brucker, 27, intern in "Female Admitting," shook his head and patted the brother on the shoulder. The woman was wheeled away, for oxygen and digitalis, and more detailed examination. The next case, a woman with an injured leg, arrived in a wheelchair.

It was the "hell night" that comes every week to Cook County Hospital—it starts a few hours before Saturday midnight and ends shortly after Sunday's dawn.

Good Neighbor. A young man in mechanic's cap and windbreaker half-carried a little old man down the long green corridor to "Male Examining." "Are you this man's son?" asked Dr. Lawrence Knopp, the intern.

The young fellow shook his head. "No, sir," he said. "My wife and I live next door. The old man and his wife live alone. The last couple of weeks the old man's been keeling over. We've been worrying about him. When it happened tonight, my wife thought I ought to bring him here."

The old man, obviously in pain, could not understand the intern's questions. Dr. Knopp asked for the admitting slip. He frowned over the man's name for a moment, then asked carefully: "Du redzt Yiddish? [Do you speak Yiddish?]"

"'Yah," whispered the old man eagerly.

"Vus is der mehr, Papa?"

"Ich bin kronk," was the shy answer. "Du kenst mir fixen? [I'm sick. You can fix me up?]"

Dr. Knopp said he would do his best. From the old man's wife, waiting in the corridor, he learned that his patient was a diabetic, on insulin for ten years. While he went on with his examination, Dr. Knopp sent the woman off with her young neighbor to be interviewed by a social service worker.

"What Made Him Do It?" Outside, a siren wailed and faded. Two cops brought in a 15-year-old Negro on a stretcher. "A kid with the big ideas shot out of him," volunteered one of the cops. "Tried to hold up a grocery, so the groceryman goes for his .38 and lets the kid have it." Almost as an afterthought he added, "The gun the kid had was empty to begin with."

The boy had been given morphine, but he was still sobbing when an intern bent over him. A neat little hole showed where the slug had entered the lower left side of his chest. "Probably hit a lung," the doctor said. An attendant was getting ready to take the boy to surgery when his mother and father, a packinghouse worker, arrived.