“Do you understand me?”

“Butchers,” Mr. Stratton whispered.

Silverstone turned on his heel and walked away, followed obediently by fourteen shadows dressed in white.

They gathered in the surgical amphitheater for the Mortality Conference.

“What the devil is the Mortality Conference?” Jack Moylan, the intern next to Spurgeon, whispered after glancing at the mimeographed first-day schedule.

Spurgeon knew. They had held Mortality Conferences in New York, although as a student he had been ineligible to attend.

“A place where your mistakes fly home to roost,” he said.

Moylan looked puzzled.

“You’ll end up calling it the Death Committee like everyone else. The entire surgical staff meets to review deaths on the Service and decide if they were preventable—and if they were, why they weren’t prevented. It’s a method of continuing education and surgical quality control. A responsibility-fixer, a kind of professional pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.”

“Jesus,” the other intern said.

They sat in the rising tiers of seats, drinking coffee or Pepsi in cardboard cups. One of the nurses passed plates of Oreos and Uneeda Biscuits. In the front of the room Silverstone and Meomartino sat at opposite ends of a small table piled with case records. For administrative and teaching purposes, the house officers were divided into two groups, the Blue Team and the Red Team. Cases concerning the Red Team were handled by Meomartino, while the Blue Team was overseen by Silverstone.

Next to an empty seat at the beginning of the first row, the Associate Chief of Surgical Services, Dr. Bester Caesar Kender (“when in trouble it’s Bester C. Kender”), a cigar-chewing former Air Force colonel who had made a national name for himself as the Service’s kidney surgeon and transplant innovator, was telling an earthy story to Dr. Joel Sack, head of Pathology. They were a study in physical contrasts, Kender a big, hirsute man with a florid complexion and the slow sound of his Maine potato-country origins still in his speech, Sack bald and fussy-looking, a wry chipmunk of a man.

Sitting together were the two Chinese on the staff, Dr. Lewis Chin, a native Bostonian and a Visiting Surgeon, and moon-faced Dr. Harry Lee, a third-year resident from Formosa; and, as if for comfort, the two females, Dr. Miriam Parkhurst, another Visiting, and Dr. Helena Manning, a cool, assured girl who was a first-year resident.

Everyone rose when the Chief of Surgery entered the room, Spurgeon sloshing cola over the edge of his cup onto the leg of his beautiful fresh whites.

Dr. Longwood nodded and they sat obediently.

“Gentlemen,” he said.

“I welcome those of you who are new to Suffolk County General Hospital.

“This is a busy municipal institution which offers you a brutally heavy work load and demands a great deal from you in return.

“Our standards are high. It is expected that each of you will do no less than fulfill your promise.

“The meeting about to commence is the Mortality Conference. It is that portion of the week which is most important to your continuing professional development. Once you leave the operating room the surgery you perform there becomes a thing of the past. At this meeting your failures and mine will be hauled out and examined under the searching scrutiny of our peers. What happens here, perhaps even more than what happens in the operating room, is what will turn you into surgeons.”