Readers would perhaps like to know more of the doctor, whose
professional activities are so engagingly described in the above
statement. He is a medical graduate of recent vintage, poor but
aristocratic, engaged to attend four hours a day at the penitentiary at
a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. "I need the money," he once
admitted to a colleague in the prison. Keegan, as we have seen, was
under his penetrating eye for months, and he died a few days after the
young gentleman had assured him that there was nothing the matter with
him. The doctor dresses well, and has an air; he has the use of an
automobile, and sometimes escorts good looking young nurses, or other
young ladies, about the prison grounds. He has a knack at surgical
operations, and urges prisoners to be operated upon; they sometimes
recover, and sometimes do not. His use of drugs in his practise seems to
have been mainly restricted to prescribing salts, and the hole, both
effective in their way, but not always happy in their application to the
cases under consideration.
He was always civil to me, and put me under the obligation of saving my
life, for he ordered me a milk diet when I was succumbing to the
influences of prison hash and "hot dog." It was part of his duty to
visit the dining room every day--or was it every other day?--and inspect
the food served to the prisoners. During my six months' stay, he
appeared twice in the doorway, where he exchanged amenities with the
guard; and once he traversed the aisle between my row of tables and the
next, accompanied by some very nice looking girls. He had other duties,
which he discharged with similar punctuality and fervor. And all for
fifteen hundred a year.
There was a hearty, full-blooded, good natured young fellow, with red
hair, who worked in the blacksmith's shop, and worked well. His overseer
was a negro--this often happens in Atlanta Penitentiary. The heat in the
forge room during summer was intense, and the red haired boy used to get
rush of blood to the head, and finally asked a high official for leave
to step out in the open air occasionally and cool off. It was granted.
But on one of these outings his negro master ordered him to go back and
do a job of work for him; the other quoted his official permission;
there was a wrangle, ending in an appeal to a higher official still. The
latter, in the face of the lower official's testimony that he had
authorized the recess, supported the negro, and the young blacksmith was
sentenced to five days in the dark cell and thirty days' loss of good
time. Discipline must be preserved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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