The Story of Dr. Wassell

SOON after he returned to America in July 1942 I spent a few
days almost continuously with Dr. Wassell for the purpose of obtaining the
material on which this story is based. I had also interviewed some of the men
from the
Marblehead
(their names are fictional in the story), and had
visited Arkansas and talked intimately to many of the doctor’s friends and
relatives, including his wife and his mother. I did not expect that a task
begun so documentarily would become, in retrospect, an almost spiritual
experience, but it happened; and therefore I dedicate this story to the hero
of it, not only in admiration for his courage, but in personal gratitude for
an enrichment of faith during difficult days.

CORYDON WASSELL was born on July 4 (a good date), 1884, at
Little Rock,
Arkansas—a good place that can also claim Douglas MacArthur as one of
its sons. The Wassell family came originally from Kidderminster, England, and
the “Corydon” came from well, nobody seems to know.

Young Cory enjoyed a mixed education and a wandering youth; he did not
decide on a profession till he was twenty-two. Then he studied at Johns
Hopkins, after which he graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1909 and
began practising in the small Arkansas village of Tillar.

For the next five years he faced the usual struggles, problems, and
hardships of a young doctor, but he was a gay sort of fellow, fond of a good
time and a good story, and by no means depressed by a world in which the
desires of the few so manifestly outweigh the needs of the many. He did,
however, find himself taking sides in it—rather as Moliére’s M.
Jourdain found himself talking prose in it—with a naďve unawareness
that anything so natural to him could be given a name. But it could, and
doubtless was; and meanwhile he went his own way, working hard, enjoying
life, and acquiring considerable popularity among those who could not pay
their bills. Two things he did are worth special mention: he organized a sort
of group-medicine scheme for Negro workers, and he married a village
schoolteacher.

One day in 1913 the President of Suchow University came to Tillar and
talked in the Episcopal Church about the needs of China. After the meeting
the doctor found himself taking sides again—the same side, actually,
though at the other side of the world. His wife being in full agreement, they
both left Arkansas as prospective missionaries a few months later to make a
new home at Wuchang, on the Yangtze River. Here the doctor studied Chinese,
worked in the hospital at Boone University, and raised a family.

Except for a short furlough in 1919 (during which his fourth child, a son,
was born at Little Rock), Dr. Wassell spent in all a dozen years in China.
Four of them were European War years—all of them were Chinese war
years. He did a great many things during this time. He learned to love the
Chinese people, and to derive a great personal happiness from being among
them; he diagnosed, treated, and operated at hospitals; he took a course in
neurology at Peking Medical College and studied parasitology at Hunan Yale;
he published articles on encephalitis in medical journals and examined
thousands of snails in a search for the carrier of amoebic dysentery; he
taught Chinese students, both in Chinese and in English; he mixed well with
American and English residents, and had no trouble in avoiding religious
friction with Buddhists and Catholics. He was perhaps every other inch a
missionary. Presently he resigned from the society and took on the triple
tasks of port doctor at Kukiang, consultant in a Catholic hospital, and a
private practice; there were changes too in his personal life, for his wife
had died, and he married again—an American missionary-nurse (his
present wife); and all the time he was intermittently mixed up with war and
revolution as well as with disease and pestilence, so that he served with
equal readiness a Chinese army at the front and a British Consulate in a
besieged concession…a busy, varied, arduous career, confusing only if you
look at it as anything but that of a man trying to be of constant use during
times and in a country both confusing and confused.

(And—significantly for what happened later—he joined the U. S.
Naval Reserve.)

In 1927 confusion, reaching a climax, drove him home—back to Little
Rock, where he had another fling at private practice and earned just enough
in the first six months to pay his office rent. Soon, however, a county job
fell to him, and this was much better—that of organizing and officering
a public health system in the schools. But once again—and again with
something of M. Jourdain’s unawareness—the doctor found himself a
pioneer. This time, in addition to the Negro, there was the Catholic, and the
man of any race or religion who couldn’t afford a two-dollar fee for
immunization against a diphtheria epidemic. Dr. Wassell championed them
all—not as a crusader, but as a public-health official who very simply
believed it was his duty to safeguard public health.

Then came the Depression, when dollars were even scarcer and diseases even
more plentiful. Malaria spread in parts of Arkansas, and on account of his
Chinese experience Dr. Wassell was given the job of fighting it in local CCC
camps, one of which was established in quarterboats on the Mississippi and
nicknamed “the CCC Navy.” Here he made many young friends and was almost as
happy as he had been in China.

But there was another Navy that he had not forgotten and that had not
forgotten him. In 1936, at the age of fifty-two, he resumed regular
commissioned duty, and 1940 (the CCC era ended) saw him at Key West, serving
on a submarine inspection board and wondering if the Navy would think him too
old for a real job if a real war emergency should arise.

The blurred line of destiny becomes a little clearer now. In September
1941 he was ordered to Cavite, and was to have sailed from San Francisco on
the morning of December 7. That sailing was delayed, and that destination
changed. It had to be Java instead—and at the end of January.

On February 4 the cruisers
Houston
and
Marblehead
were in
action off the Java coast. Badly battered by a much heavier Japanese force,
they yet managed to limp into port, and Dr. Wassell, just arrived on the
island, was among those detailed to take care of many wounded men.

“Dr. Wassell,” said the President in a broadcast speech to the nation on
the twenty-eighth of April, 1942, “remained with these men, knowing that he
would be captured by the enemy. But he decided to make a desperate attempt to
get the men out of Java. He asked each of them if he wished to take the
chance and every one agreed. He first had to get the twelve men to the
seacoast. The men were suffering severely, but Dr. Wassell kept them alive by
his skill and inspired them by his own courage. As the official report said,
Dr. Wassell was ‘almost like a Christ-like shepherd devoted to his
flock.’”

* * * * *

THE men from the
Marblehead
looked up from their cots
and wondered what the doctor would be like. They were wounded, burned, and
suffering; thousands of miles from home, in a strange country among people
who spoke strange languages; their ship had been smashed up, and the battle
lost for their side. Pain, defeat, and loneliness had leagued against them
during the journey from Tjilatjap, on the coast, to the inland hospital;
there they had been skillfully patched up by Dutch surgeons, and a certain
measure of sad tranquillity had come upon them. The Dutch were very kind, and
the Javanese nurses flitted about like little friendly animals. But what had
really cheered them considerably, after so much disaster, was the news that
an American Navy Doctor had been assigned to take care of them all.

When you are ill and in pain and have to have things done for you, the
personality of a doctor becomes of absorbing interest. If you have time to
wonder about him in advance, you cannot help idealizing; and the picture is
hound to be the image of your own ideals. To McGuffey, Ship’s Cook, whose
injuries were slighter than those of the others, the doctor must surely be a
big burly fellow, an earth-bound superman with strong hands and a deep black
voice, like the bark of a retriever dog; because that was the kind of man and
dog McGuffey loved. To Francini, Second Class Seaman, the image was a little
different. His prewar ambitions had been to study mathematics and become a
gunnery officer; now his earthly desire, almost the only one he could find
room for, was to ease the pain of shrapnel wounds; but all this did not
prevent him from picturing the doctor as a quiet, scholarly man, one who
could take in the problems of the human body and solve them like some vast
quadratic equation.

And so with all the others, though few of them guessed and none confessed
that such pictures were shaping in their minds. But when they knew that the
doctor was to visit them they looked up with curious eagerness at the sound
of new footsteps along the corridor. And presently he came.

For a fraction of a second before they saw him they saw his cigarette in a
long white holder; and because none of them had expected that, it prepared
them for other unexpected things. But the unexpected was naturally the
disappointing, because when you have imagined perfection anything different
must be rather a pity. The men thought the doctor’s entire appearance was
rather a pity. There was nothing striking about him, except perhaps his ears,
which were rather large. McGuffey, whose own right ear had been partly burned
off by a bomb blast, could not help noticing them especially. Furthermore, he
dressed neither carelessly nor smartly enough to inspire a legend; his open
shirt and light trousers were just unimpressively neat, and he walked into
the ward with an almost apologetic air, as if he were not quite sure he had
found the right place.

Moreover, not only was there this long cigarette holder, but he leaned
over the rail of one of the end beds and began, in a slow, drawling voice:
“Morning, boys.” He then gave his name, adding: “But just call me Doc or
Commander—anything you like.” (McGuffey thought cynically: “I’ll call
you something if you don’t stop dropping ashes all over my bed…”) The
doctor went on, gaining confidence as he heard his own voice: “The main thing
is for you to know that I’m here to help you. So cheer up—our number’s
on top—everything’s going to be all right from now on. Of course the
Dutch doctors are in charge of your treatment.” (“Thank God for that!”
thought McGuffey.) “My job’s just to look after you in a general sort of way.
So don’t worry, we’ll have you all well again in no time.”

A little sigh was already running through the minds of the men from the
Marblehead
. The old stuff. Nothing wrong about it, of course, and had
it been barked out in a quarter-deck voice it would have sounded well enough,
and perhaps even stimulating. But in that curious slow drawl and with the
long cigarette holder, it carried a whiff of unconvincingness.

McGuffey, shrugging his shoulders under the bedcovers, thought openly:
“Just our luck, on top of everything else, to get a fellow like that…”

And the doctor at that moment was thinking much the same kind of thing
about his job. To begin with, he could not quite size up what he had to do,
for the hospital was so well-equipped and the Dutch staff were so obviously
competent that there did not seem likely to be many tasks left over for him.
And that, in a way, caused his initial misgiving—not a cynical one, but
rather a degree of humility based on the plain fact that all his life he had
had jobs that had come to nothing much (like the amoebic dysentery research
in China), or had petered out (like the CCC Camp), or had just failed to
click into anything that could be called success. He had never wasted time in
self- pity, but he had to recognize, midway through his fifties, that the
confidence with which it was natural for him to tackle new things was not, as
a rule, justified by results. Perhaps also (but again without self-pity) he
had been a shade unlucky in some of his affairs. At any rate, he had been on
too many losing sides to feel that his partisanship brought luck to anyone
else.