“I am serious.” Swayne put down his brandy glass and leaned forward to make his point. “Oh, I admit—show me a child in leg braces and I’ll cringe with the rest and reach for my checkbook. But I’m talking of the grand design. The fact is—and I challenge anyone to deny it—we’re busily engaged in weakening the human race.”
It was a familiar argument. O’Donnell said courteously, “Would you suggest that we should stop medical research, freeze our knowledge and techniques, not try to conquer any more diseases?”
“You couldn’t do it,” Swayne said. “You couldn’t do it any more than you could have stopped the Gadarene swine jumping off their cliff.”
O’Donnell laughed. “I’m not sure I like the analogy. But if that is so, then why the argument?”
“Why?” Swayne banged a fist on the arm of his chair. “Because you can still deplore something, even though there’s nothing you can do to force a change.”
“I see.” O’Donnell was not sure he wanted to get deeper into this discussion. Besides, it might not help relations with Swayne, either for himself or Orden Brown, which was really why they had come here. He glanced around at the others in the room. Amelia Brown, whom he had come to know well through his visits to the chairman’s home, caught his eye and smiled. As a wife who kept herself posted on all her husband’s activities, she was well informed about hospital politics.
Swayne’s married daughter, Denise Quantz, was sitting forward, listening intently.
At dinner O’Donnell had several times found his eyes traveling, almost involuntarily, in Mrs. Quantz’s direction. He had found it difficult to reconcile her as the daughter of the rugged, hard-bitten man who sat at the table’s head. At seventy-eight Eustace Swayne still exhibited much of the toughness he had learned in the competitive maelstrom of large-scale retail merchandising. At times he took advantage of his age to toss out barbed remarks to his guests, though O’Donnell suspected that most times their host was merely angling for an argument. O’Donnell had found himself thinking: The old boy still likes a fight, even if it’s only in words. In the same way he had an instinct now that Swayne was overstating his feelings about medicine, though perhaps in this case merely for the sake of being ornery. Watching the old man covertly, O’Donnell had suspected gout and rheumatism might be factors here.
But, in contrast, Denise Quantz was gentle and softly spoken. She had a trick of taking the edge from a remark of her father’s by adding a word or two to what he had said. She was beautiful too, O’Donnell thought, with the rare mature loveliness which sometimes comes to a woman at forty. He gathered that she was visiting Eustace Swayne and came to Burlington fairly frequently. Probably this was to keep an eye on her father; he knew that Swayne’s own wife had died many years before. It was evident from conversation, though, that most of the time Denise Quantz lived in New York. There were a couple of references made to children, but a husband was not mentioned. He gained the impression that she was either separated or divorced. Mentally O’Donnell found himself comparing Denise Quantz with Lucy Grainger. There was a world of difference, he thought, between the two women: Lucy with her professional career, at ease in the environment of medicine and the hospital, able to meet someone like himself on ground familiar to them both; and Denise Quantz, a woman of leisure and independence, a figure in society no doubt, and yet—he had the feeling—someone who would make a home a place of warmth and serenity. O’Donnell wondered which kind of woman was better for a man: one who was close to his working life, or someone separate and detached, with other interests beyond the daily round.
His thoughts were interrupted by Denise. Leaning toward him, she said, “Surely you’re not going to give up so easily, Dr. O’Donnell. Please don’t let my father get away with that.”
The old man snorted. “There’s nothing to get away with. It’s a perfectly clear situation. For years the natural balance of nature kept populations in check. When the birth rate became too great there were famines to offset it.”
Orden Brown put in, “But surely some of that was political. It wasn’t always a force of nature.”
“I’ll grant you that in some cases.” Eustace Swayne waved his hand airily. “But there was nothing political in the elimination of the weak.”
“Do you mean the weak or the unfortunate?” Very well, O’Donnell thought, if you want an argument I’ll give you one.
“I mean what I say—the weak.” The old man’s voice had a sharper tone, but O’Donnell sensed he was enjoying this. “When there was a plague or an epidemic, it was the weak who were wiped out and the strong survived. Other illnesses did the same thing; there was a level maintained—nature’s level. And because of this it was the strong who perpetuated themselves. They were the ones who sired the next generation.”
“Do you really think, Eustace, that mankind is so degenerate now?” Amelia Brown had asked the question, and O’Donnell saw she was smiling. She knows that Swayne’s enjoying this, he thought.
“We’re moving toward degeneracy,” the old man answered her, “at least in the Western world. We’re preserving the cripples, the weaklings, and the disease-ridden. We’re accumulating burdens on society, non-producers—the unfit, unable to contribute anything to the common good. Tell me—what purpose does a sanatorium or a home for incurables serve? I tell you, medicine today is preserving people who should be allowed to die. But we’re helping them to live, then letting them spawn and multiply, passing along their uselessness to their children and their children’s children.”
O’Donnell reminded him, “The relationship between disease and heredity is far from clear.”
“Strength is of the mind as well as the body,” Eustace Swayne snapped back. “Don’t children inherit the mental characteristics of their parents—and their weaknesses?”
“Not all of the time.” This was between the old tycoon and O’Donnell now. The others sat back, listening.
“But a lot of the time they do. Well, don’t they?”
O’Donnell smiled. “There’s some evidence that way, yes.”
Swayne snorted. “It’s one of the reasons we’ve so many mental hospitals. And patients in them. And people running to psychiatrists.”
“It could also be that we’re more aware of mental health.”
Swayne mimicked him. “It could also be that we’re breeding people who are weak, weak, weak!”
The old man had almost shouted the last words. Now a bout of coughing seized him. I’d better go easily, O’Donnell thought. He probably has high blood pressure.
Just as if O’Donnell had spoken, Eustace Swayne glared across at him. The old man took a sip of brandy. Then, almost malevolently, he said, “Don’t try to spare me, my young medical friend. I can handle all your arguments and more.”
O’Donnell decided he would go on but more moderately. He said, quietly and reasonably, “I think there’s one thing you’re overlooking, Mr. Swayne. You say that illness and disease are nature’s levelers. But many of these things haven’t come to us in the natural course of nature. They’re the result of man’s own environment, conditions he’s created himself. Bad sanitation, lack of hygiene, slums, air pollution—those aren’t natural things; they’re man’s creation.”
“They’re part of evolution and evolution is a part of nature. It all adds up to the balancing process.”
Admiringly O’Donnell thought: You can’t shake the old son of a gun easily. But he saw the chink in the other’s argument. He said, “If you’re right, then medicine is a part of the balancing process too.”
Swayne snapped back, “How do you reason that?”
“Because medicine is a part of evolution.” Despite his good resolution O’Donnell felt his voice grow more intense. “Because every change of environment that man has had produced its problems for medicine to face and to try to solve. We never solve them entirely. Medicine is always a little behind, and as fast as we meet one problem there’s a new one appearing ahead.”