Word: croaker
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With these words from a lead editorial in the prison News, the convicts at California's San Quentin prison this week said goodbye to "The Croaker." Dr. Leo Leonidas Stanley, just turned 65, had retired after 38 years as San Quentin's prison doctor...
...Croaker first came to work as "chief surgeon" at San Quentin for $75 a month in 1913. The first operation he witnessed on his rounds of the dank, dirty, two-story prison hospital was performed under protest. Four convicts held a screaming patient while a fifth lunged at his infected tooth with a pair of pliers. Tuberculous patients wandered freely among healthy prisoners, "spitting blood until they were almost too weak to stand." There were no separate wards for women in the hospital, and the only semblance of a surgery was a table tucked in a corner of the doctor...