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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 her ‘born-in-China’ origins that had something to do with her fascination with murder American style, but whatever it was, I personally found mainstream murder mysteries not at all relaxing or to my taste in recreational reading material.
What I myself did find of interest, curiously, was Old West frontier fiction. Stories about the old American frontier west, with its rugged heroes and gorgeous gals. Of course, I had been raised as a child on the early (and uniquely 50s style) TV ‘cowboy’ series, such as the Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry shows, Death Valley Days, The Rifleman, Wagon Train, Laramie and so many others. Most kids in that day were brought up on a steady diet of ‘good guys’ (always handsome, clean shaven and wearing white hats) and ‘bad guys’ (almost always Indians of any kind, but also a few surly black-hatted cowboys with mean, spiteful natures). Native Americans on such shows were categorically typified either as a deadly nuisance…
