“You have to understand that interns, like everybody else, have their own little…eccentricities. I have seen yearend pranks pulled that would stand your hair on end—cadavers in the cafeteria, you know? We try to be a little tolerant of these things—after all, these young people are under a lot of pressure, and they don’t get much time off—but we keep a close eye on them, all the same. I’ve had alcoholics, drug addicts, nymphomaniacs—all sorts of problems exhibit themselves, and, usually, with a little counseling, we can keep the offender in the program, maybe make a fine physician out of him later on. We’re not out to wreck careers, here; these kids come to us with eight years of higher education, and they’ve worked hard. But we have to draw the line somewhere.”

“Where did you draw it with Herbert Van Fleet?”

“Van Fleet was one of our brighter interns,” Garfield said, placing his feet on his desk, unwilling to be hurried. “He finished, I don’t know, sixth or seventh in his med school class at Columbia, and he exhibited an inclination toward pathology. Might have been good at it, too; unfortunately, that was not the only inclination he exhibited.” He paused.

“Go on, Doctor,” Stone encouraged.

“Van Fleet appeared to be attracted to sick people.”

“That seems like a desirable quality in a physician.”

Garfield shook his head. “I’m not making myself clear,” he said. “I mean he exhibited a sexual attraction for the ill. Women, that is. He seemed very uncomfortable with male patients, didn’t like to touch them. One of his professors at Columbia told me that, as a med student, he had refused to work on a male cadaver, except when forced to study the genitalia. My guess is that he was suppressing homosexual, or at least bisexual, tendencies, and that he had difficulty accepting these tendencies or dealing with them.”

“How did this attraction to ill women manifest itself?”

“The chief resident noticed that he was spending a lot of extra time with young women patients, especially those recovering from injury or surgery, looking frequently into the rooms of these patients. If someone else was in attendance, he’d leave; he’d wait until they were alone before he visited them. The nurses noticed him, and there were jokes about it. The patients always seemed to be those who had IV’s running. We started to keep a watch on him, surreptitiously.

“About that time, we had a very well-known actress in here as the result of an automobile accident. She had to have extensive reconstructive surgery done on a hand, and, as you can imagine, the reaction among the interns to the presence of this famous and beautiful woman was startling. A lot of them suddenly exhibited a keen interest in surgery of the hand. Van Fleet, in particular, was attentive.