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    . . .a thin triangular flap of a heart valve. . . a small book usually having a paper cover . . . a medical lit-art e-journal from The Permanente Press
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Spread the Word

See Bio & Other Work

Andy Runkle, MD

Contributor's Note

We discovered months after moving into our home that it was built in 1904 for a young physician and his family. He was the assistant medical director for a long-since-demolished tuberculosis sanitarium, which was built and operated in Asheville, NC by his physician father. This large health resort was located across the street from our home.

When I learned that this physician son (Silvio) and his 16-year-old daughter (Silvia) died early in the 1918 influenza pandemic, the entire story took on a new dramatic component. I remained curious about the role that this family and their work played in the foundation of the neighborhood we just joined. It became clear that our neighbors did not know their land held the most famous sanitarium during Asheville’s first golden era as a health resort.

I began to write the story of this family’s fight against ‘The White Plague’ (tuberculosis) There are hundreds of old newspaper clippings that inform my work. These collected from a time when the comings and goings of local physicians were deemed newsworthy. The 94-year-old niece of the sanitarium director gracefully came to visit our home and brought old family pictures of characters whose faces I thought would never be seen. The project also took me to the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, MD to explore a large box of old correspondence documenting a time in 1913 when the US Public Health service came to investigate the claims being made that father and son had developed a vaccine for tuberculosis. Delightfully, our local library holds a box containing dozens and dozens of donated private letters written between the physician son while on the road and his wife back home (now our home).

I worked on this short section of the novel at the 2018 Annual Taos Writing & Wellness Retreat.

The Night Doctor

Vol 6: Iss 2, Prose

Author’s note: The following is an excerpt from a historical novel set in Asheville, NC; then a hotbed of tuberculosis 'climate-cure’ sanitariums. The reminiscing narrator (Champ Burgin) and his father (“Pops”) were employed throughout their lives by Dr Karl von Ruck at his popular Winyah Sanitarium. Dr von Ruck created and sold various extracts that he claimed could be used as vaccine, test, and cure for tuberculosis. The height of his fame came after publication of his May 1912 JAMA article.1 In 1913, he pleaded with the Surgeon General and President Wilson to validate his methods. A government research team was sent to Asheville and sparks began to fly … 

The long table near the new laboratory sink was arrayed with burners, porcelains, filters and glass. The door was open for the breeze and Pops quietly swept the hall outside, soft of feet to ease the resting of the guests. 

Dr von Ruck spoke to his rabbits that night, a few peering out from their soiled cages. “It is high time I turn the bacteria into their own enemy. To fashion them into ghosts to haunt their very selves,” he said tapping his fingertips urgently. 

The doctor’s deep tone made it easy for Pops to overhear despite the high hissing flames ever-present in the laboratory. 

Von Ruck murmured, “In that microscope lens, I see them alive in their clumps and clusters. So perfect and small, so elegant and deadly. Projected large to my eye, they are laughing back. All over the world teasing as we, the best men, try to outsmart them.”

Pointing around the room, he continued, “I can burn the germs in a dish, boil them in a flask, smash them into a paste. I can damage their tiny frames like I am a Goliath. Here in the laboratory, I lord over them. But let live ones loose in a small child or a wayward poet or you, a good rabbit, and consumption is the victor. Still, it is not too late for that victor to be spoiled.”

During these long night sessions, the science room odors only intensified out into the sanitarium halls. Pops knew the easy whiffs of alcohol, cedar, and feces from his morning rounds cleaning the rabbit cages. But even outside the room, that lancing rancid boil smell cut through, pushing back his face.

Von Ruck paced the bay of steamed windows, pausing to wipe a pane saying, “Here in this room with these liquids, heat, and glass, I will scratch the next surface.” He spun to face the cages, “Manipulating dead germs into a safer, more hollow form to test on you.”

Pops swept past the door again, curious and a bit worried about his dramatic and increasingly exhausted boss. He peered in. Most of the rabbits were now asleep.

“I have learned it is foolish,” the doctor professed, "to inject just any dead form of tubercular germ into a fine, healthy rabbit. I will have to train you, the host, to not simply harbor the enemy and eventually succumb. I will forge an extract to strengthen your core defenses, so you can revenge the plague.” 

From the beginning, my father said that von Ruck rarely slept, working long after nightfall, breaking only to drift and jabber through the ornate halls of lungers. 

Pops began to tell people that he was working for “The Night Doctor.” Trouble was that the nickname spread. And trouble it was because Night Doctors were bad men in stories we passed as children. Old legends from city places about white doctors kidnapping black children in the night to use for experiments. Or gravedigging our Great-grands to use their bodies in anatomy school. 

Who knows proof of those evils? Mother knew before the war that some Carolina doctors abused their slaves by testing them with hellish surgeries.

So black folks calling a white man “The Night Doctor” held no quaint charm. At first, renaming von Ruck was a chuckle to me because he seemed only dangerous to small animals. But in time, it made the neighborhood wonder why we would work for that kind of a man. An experimenting man, you know? Sometimes with blood red hands from killing God’s creatures. Folks would even say he’d tease and torture these beasts he’d buy, not to eat, mind you, but to work on.

 

1. Von Ruck K. A practical method of prophylactic immunization against tuberculosis: A preliminary announcement. JAMA 1912;LVIII(20:1504-7. DOI: https:///doi.org/10.1001/jama.1912.04260050180007

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