Читать книгу St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student - Edward Berdoe, Edward Berdoe - Страница 5

Old Jeremiah Horne was the beadle of the medical school at St. Bernard’s. He had held the post now for nearly thirty years, and his father held it before him. He and his family lived on the premises, and the post was generally understood to be a lucrative one. His motto was, “Nothing for nothing, and very little for a halfpenny.” He was a portly man, very dignified in his manner towards the younger students, who were kept at arm’s-length by him for purposes they well understood. He was not hard on them for their mischief, their breach of rules, their neglect of work, or any of their shortcomings, only they had to understand, if they wanted his aid, they must tip him well and tip him often. And this they did, and so Jerry Horne “waxed fat and kicked;” and even the professors themselves somehow came to recognise that the beadle was a not less important factor in the school than one of themselves. He could restore order when they individually or collectively repeatedly failed. A word from him would reduce the most refractory to his senses, when the threats and the preaching of the teachers fell on deaf ears. His business was to see that the theatres and class-rooms were duly arranged for lectures. He had to provide a proper supply of subjects for dissection, to prepare them and allot them in due order. But his most important duty, and the one which gave him the whip hand over all the men, was to register their attendance at lectures, and so make or mar their prospects of being duly “signed up” at the end of the session. By the rules of the examining bodies at “the Hall” or the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, a student must attend a certain proportion of all the lectures delivered in his school before his papers can be received and himself duly entered as a candidate for the necessary legal examinations which he must pass before he can get his diploma or certificate to practice. Mr. Horne’s conscience was elastic; and if a sufficient number of half-crowns and shillings were flying about, he could always see and register the presence of a man in the theatre at lecture who was probably at home in bed half a mile away. As everybody voted lectures a great bore, especially those which began at 8 or 9 o’clock on a winter’s morning, this was a great convenience. The lecturers poured forth their wisdom to a scant attendance at such times, and Mr. Horne’s half-crowns grew and multiplied.

At all the lectures it was the duty of the beadle and his assistant to occupy a convenient post, in view of the whole auditory, so that he could mark the individual attendance and detect those engaged in larking during the progress of the lecture. Under such circumstances it was a task to the ingenuity of the boys to let off crackers without detection, or shy potatoes and cabbages at the botany lecturer for purposes of classification. The pundits themselves usually took the interruptions in a good-humoured way, doubtless reflecting that medical science has, from immemorial time, been imparted – in the British Isles, at least – under similar difficult conditions; so these being recognised as conditions, they had to yield to the inevitable with the best grace they might. But as they looked to the beadle to keep order by means they knew him to possess, it was incumbent on Mr. Horne, now and then, to “espy” somebody, usually one out of favour with him temporarily, either from being deep in his debt or from having wounded his dignity. When a scape-goat or two had been thus caught, they had to pass an unpleasant quarter of an hour in the private room of the warden, and give assurances of better behaviour under threats of expulsion or suspension of schedules. The patience of the lecturers was admirable; they bore most interruptions with exemplary meekness, but they always resented pea-shooting as disturbing to the exact thinking and speaking necessary in treating scientific subjects. The botany lecturer, indeed, was a pattern of amiability. Not even a potato plump against his snowy shirt front, or a cabbage flop on his manuscript, disturbed him much or drove him into strong language. “Ah, thanks! yes, my young friend, that tuber is the Solanum tuberosum; it is a good specimen, but a little out of order. We have not yet reached the Solanaceæ. Will the young gentleman who has thus rather roughly drawn my attention to his specimen kindly tell me the characteristics of that order, and name the principal medicinal plants belonging to it? You, sir, I think it was, who forwarded me the example; Mr. – , Mr. – , your name escapes me for the moment. I mean the gentleman with an ecchymosis under his left eye.” The gentleman with the ecchymosis knew as much about the order in question as his bull terrier knew of astronomy; and amid the uproarious laughter of his class-mates, ever ready for a diversion of interest, on being pressed by the lecturer to exhibit his knowledge of the potato tribe, was fain to confess that he knew little more about the species than he saw of them on the dinner-table. He began to wish he had not thrown that tuber, and the laugh was well turned against him as the lecturer scored several neat points in dealing with him. This was one of the recognised and old-established methods of defence adopted by the persecuted teachers, and a good example of the survival of the fittest theory. The chair could really only be held by development of such defence, and the ingenuity of the students in organizing new systems of attack had to be met by improvement in their repulse. It was armour-plating versus guns, and the armour-plating generally saved the ship. Professor Letts would have been a lost man one morning at the chemistry lecture had he not caught the man who threw the lighted squib on the lecture table, where it fizzed and bobbed amongst his neatly fixed-up apparatus for an hour with the gases. “You, sir!” he cried, in his determined, assertive manner that always commanded and secured respect; “you, sir, you squib-thrower, come forward to the black-board! You are going up for your preliminary science; give me the chemical formula for that explosive. We are considering nitrogen this morning; you shall give the audience the benefit of your, doubtless, complete knowledge of your favourite gas. Nitrogen is your favourite gas, is it not, Mr. Albery?” Now poor Albery had to maintain a reputation for chemistry on a very slender basis, and withal was a nervous man; and being all the while unmercifully twitted by Mr. Letts, his symbols got mixed, and he returned to his seat feeling that the squib itself was not more completely “bust up” than he. One of the best retorts was made by the professor of anatomy, who, entering the theatre for lecture one afternoon, found that the skeleton, which always hung on a stand near the lecturer’s table, had been removed from its frame and placed on one of the benches in the auditorium, and was seated in a free and easy manner, with a long clay pipe in its ghastly jaws, and a pewter pot in its left hand. Dr. Hawkes took in the situation at a glance, and said, “Gentlemen, I miss our old friend the skeleton from its accustomed place, and perceive it in a new character seated amongst you. We shall, this afternoon, go on with our remarks on the vertebral column, and I have no doubt my address will be as useful to its empty cranium as it will be to those by which it is surrounded.”

It was many a long day before that trick was played again.

The worst attacks were always made on poor young Dr. Harburne, who held the chair of Materia Medica. He was not equal to dealing with them, and took the matter to heart so much that he soon retired. He was a most able physician, and the more studious of the men did their utmost to repress the disturbances, which were so frequent as to make it impossible for anybody to learn anything or to gain the least benefit from the very valuable course of lectures on this important subject. He often left the theatre, finding it impossible with his meek and gentle manner, and his lack of any power of retort or ability to make reprisals, to continue his address. “Come back, papa,” they would cry; “we are good now!” He knew the ringleaders, but he was too amiable and patient to expose them. “Ah, gentlemen,” he said one day in the lull of a storm of interruption, “the day will come when you will be standing helpless by the bedside of some loved one whom you would give your own lives perhaps to save, and will be powerless by reason of opportunities you are wasting now! I do not envy your reflections then. I pardon you now; your punishment will come later!” Poor fellow! he died in harness, a victim to his long years of hard work in toxicology. In a fit of depression he swallowed prussic acid, just after leaving the profession an exhaustive treatise on its uses!

Such were the lectures at St. Bernard’s, and so passed the time which should have been spent in acquiring information for which the prescribed four years’ course was all too short to gather. No wonder that so many men hold hospital lectures to be almost useless, and attend them no more frequently than they are obliged, when they are generally only occasions of childish amusement. It was not the idle and dissipated who neglected these opportunities – too often these mustered in force for the sake of the fun. It was the best men, who felt that their own rooms and their books could better assist their progress.

Jerry Horne was an accomplished photographer, and used to do many strange and interesting things with his camera. He would get a collection of skeletons from the museum, and arrange them in novel and curious attitudes. One scene was a ball-room, all the dancers being skeletons; another was an inquest, with coroner, witnesses, and jurymen, all skeletons; another an operating theatre, with a skeleton surgeon and assistants, a skeleton patient and spectators. But the favourite subject with the students was the skeleton lecturer, with a skeleton audience larking and otherwise neglecting the business for which they had assembled. The boys bought all these drolleries, and horrified and even appalled their mammas and sisters when they went home, by exhibiting them in a gay and easy manner, thus manifesting their indifference to and contempt of death and the ultimate destiny of man.

Elsworth often thought of the lines Louis XIV. was fond of quoting from Racine: —

One of these two men within him was doomed to perish, which should it be? The wild follies of his companions had a strange fascination for him, and daily he seemed getting spiritually harder and more engrossed with unworthy pursuits. He was full of fun, and there seemed such drollery to be got out of upsetting policemen, leaping closed toll-gates without paying, and such-like pranks, that the lofty purposes with which he entered seemed like the blossoms in spring, which yield to the first frosty night after their appearance. Of course he could have held on his way had he been firmer, but the majority of the better-hearted men were so given to these sprees that he seemed to be merely finding his natural level in joining with them.

Dr. Day often invited Elsworth to spend an evening with him at his lodgings. The great anatomist was not a man of one book, but of world-wide reading and information. Nothing was too small for him to notice, no subject too deep for him to study: he lived to know. There was a charm about the old man, and the calm philosophic way he bore his reverses commanded the respect of all who knew his story. There was one subject on which he was impervious to argument: he would never admit that it concerned him in the least how the subjects for dissection had come into his hands. “If people like to use dynamite and the knife to advance their political projects, what has that to do with the leaders of the party who profit by their actions? Is it not an infamous calumny to accuse them of being the associates of murderers? My work was to teach anatomy. I did not kill people, I did not employ those who did. If the greed of money prompted men to do improper things, how could I be held responsible for them simply because I paid liberally and asked no questions?”

He cared nothing for the healing art; his speciality was the dead subject. The only true use in living, he seemed to think, was to provide the anatomist with good subjects for his table. The man had not lived in vain who had served Robert Day with his frame. He was an atheist, a dogmatic atheist, interested not merely in denying the God of the Bible, but in proving the impossibility of the existence of any Supreme Being at all. Hence the melancholy of the man. His daughter shared his views, for she worshipped her father, and he had taken care she should learn nothing of religion from her infancy. They took pains to imbue Elsworth with their opinions; not that they vulgarly scoffed at his faith, but as propagandists of “the religion of Man” they declared it their duty to wage war against that of God. The learning of the old man and his daughter tempted our student to many a discussion with them; he thought if his faith would not stand a little argument it was not worth much. An orange tree grows and bears fruit in the open air in the South, but soon sickens and dies in an English garden. It was rash of Elsworth to subject his faith to such a test. He was doing what has proved fatal to many a youthful mind.