MEDICINE AND THE FRONTIER ‘OLD WEST’
First a little ‘back-story’…
Many years ago, when I was still somewhat romantically inclined, I was going with a lovely young doctor from China. This person, whom we shall fictitiously call ‘Mai’, was maintaining the typically arduous and exhaustive routines of a first year medical resident at the hospital I worked at in Oakland CA. Mai, who was actually what we call a ‘paper daughter’ (a familial ruse that enabled Chinese immigrants to circumvent the infamous ‘Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), seldom had a chance to relax or get away from the demands that being a post-graduate doctor places upon one. Consequently, whenever she had a chance, she sought escape in American murder mysteries, a genre well-established in the United States for more than a half-century.
Personally, I could not begin to fathom what she saw in that topic she had chosen for ‘relaxing reading’, since her work brought her into daily contact with gun-shot cases, murder victims, stabbings, child & spousal abuse, autopsies, slain cadavers, and God knows what all in the hospital’s ER…and since we’re talking about Alameda County’s ‘Highland General Hospital’ (regarded as the Western equivalent of Chicago’s Cook County Hospital), which is a major teaching center in the San Francisco Bay Area, there were always plenty of murders & mayhem (stabbings, shootings, etc.) on hand. Perhaps it was…
