Читать книгу Life is an Adventure - R. J. Manion - Страница 9

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Perhaps the most delightful period of any man’s life is that comprised in the carefree days of college—carefree at least until examination time comes round. The youthful mind is so elastic that responsibilities are not taken too seriously, and at any rate are rarely taken in advance of their time. For most men, worry as to future difficulties puts the greatest strain upon the mental forces, but to most students this period of anxiety has not yet arrived. Add to this irresponsible habit of the student’s mind the fact that he is in the spring-time of life—

When all the world is young and all the fields are green,

And every goose is a swan and every lass a queen,

and one has a happy combination which gives to those far-off student days a glamour to the older mind which perhaps no other period in his life possesses. Someone has said that “memory was given us so that we might have roses in December,” and the roses of memory that bloomed in the years from eighteen to twenty-two or twenty-three are those which we cultivate most diligently in the gardens of our mind.

My first student days were spent at Queen’s University, Kingston, and the second and third years at Trinity University, Toronto. Between the third and fourth years Trinity amalgamated with Toronto, so that I graduated from the University of Toronto itself; and, finally, a couple of years later, a year of my life passed at the University of Edinburgh. Thus I have had a cosmopolitan experience in universities, which has appeared to me to be an advantage, inasmuch as it prevented the growth of that somewhat narrow-minded idea, possessed by so many men, that their university surpasses all others.

Studying medicine thirty-five years ago took up much less of a student’s lifetime than it does to-day, when it takes some seven years to graduate as a “Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery.” Four years of study was the ordinary course at that time, the pre-medical work of to-day not being looked upon as important, but perhaps more attention was given to anatomy, physiology, biology, and such subjects. In the anatomy course we almost immediately began dissecting, which brings in the question of supplying the “subjects” for dissection—the human bodies which are necessary if students are thoroughly to understand their anatomy. In larger cities, such as Montreal or Toronto, so many derelicts are left for public burial that there is not the difficulty in this regard which exists in a small city like Kingston. In my freshman days stories were freely circulated as to the “snatching of bodies.” I very well remember a jovial fellow-student with curly brown hair and blue eyes who had the reputation of being a body-snatcher on a fairly large scale; for while we were still at the university he was before the courts on a charge of having possessed himself of a newly-buried corpse, and he had a great deal of difficulty in escaping from the clutches of the law.

There is perhaps no branch of medical studies which is more interesting than that of dissecting the human body and knowing intimately its various parts. In my library is a steel-engraved copy of Rembrandt’s famous painting, “A Dissection in Anatomy,” which is as true to life as if it were done in a dissecting-room—as it may well have been. It was picked up long ago at an auction sale, and a few years ago on a trip to Holland we saw the original painting in a gallery at the Hague.

Medical students are no worse than other men of their age in their lack of respect for the niceties of life, yet occasionally they take part in escapades which might better be avoided. One of these, which occurred in the city of Toronto a couple of years before my arrival, was a crude Hallowe’en trick of some thoughtless students who took one of the “subjects” from the dissecting-room and hung it upon a butcher’s hooks in front of his shop. A scandal naturally ensued, and as a result the butcher was not able to continue his business, becoming a saloonkeeper in another section of the city. A backwash of this incident came to me a couple of years later, when with a fellow-student we went into his house to have a glass of beer, and, some remark of ours showing him that we were students, he angrily ordered us out, referring very heatedly to the episode, of which we were quite innocent.