Jocelyn Cullity’s new novel is set in Eureka Springs, in the Ozarks, in 1939. The Great Depression has hit Arkansas hard, and especially Eureka Springs, which had been an expensive resort, a spa where wealthy patients went for the waters and the fresh air. But now, it is a “Boomtown Gone Bust.”
The biggest hotel there has been converted to a hospital, specializing in cancer treatment. The Baker Hospital has no modesty about their achievements. A huge banner hangs outside announcing “Cancer Is Conquered.” It is always a good idea to be skeptical of premature declarations of “Mission Accomplished.”
But the hospital PR people and Norman Baker, the self-proclaimed genius and director, are confident and contemptuous of treatments for cancer other than theirs. Baker has a high wattage radio program like that of the anti-Semitic, pro-fascist radio priest Father Charles Caughlin who, at his height, had 30 million listeners out of an American population of 120 million.
Baker’s radio show, however, is not political. He promotes his very profitable hospital and denounces conventional medicine. The AMA, he says, is the “American Mummy Association” or “Amateur Meat-Cutters Association.” MD, he says stands for Most Dumb or perhaps More Dough, and suggests MD’s are pedophiles.
Baker Hospital rules forbid radium or x-ray or surgery, the accepted methods. Everything is “in harmony with the body’s curative properties.” The Baker Hospital is scrupulously sanitary, and the diet is all natural: fresh fruit and vegetables: no meat. Baker himself is addicted to strong coffee and oddly believes that “Cigarettes are all right,” as long as you use a holder and the nicotine doesn’t get on your fingers.
All this is reported to us by the narrator Della King, a freshly minted Registered Nurse at Baker. Her father had died a painful death from cancer and she is young, naïve and inclined to be on board with the treatments. But, she’s sharp, and as time passes, she notices things.
The “treatments” are frequent cups of “109 tea,” and injections of “No. 4,” a “builder upper,” a green liquid, into the hip and “No. 5,” a pink liquid into the abdomen-- to cure the tumor. She asks: No one knows the ingredients. The methods for diagnosis seem odd to her and she can’t seem to find the laboratory where urinalyses and other tests are done.
Della becomes most suspicious when Baker declares that no patient at the hospital had ever died. This seemed unlikely. How was it possible? She investigates: which applicants get admitted, for how long? Which patients are discharged as cured? Some just seem to disappear. Where do they go?
As bizarre as all this certainly seems, it is a true story. Does it still happen? Rejecting conventional science and embracing miraculous cures and fad diets never goes out of style.
