Edward Berdoe
St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITY
For those that fly may fight again,
Which he can never do that’s slain;
Hence timely running’s no mean part
Of conduct in the martial art.
– Butler.
The Divine origin of Christianity is manifested in nothing more powerfully than by the progress it rapidly made among the Latin races. Tho soft, voluptuous climates of Southern Europe would have bred, one would have thought, nations whose chief characteristics would have been gentleness and tenderness. But it is not so, and the cruelty that was deeply ingrained in the Roman nature lives on in Christian Italy and Spain, uninfluenced by some sixteen centuries of Christianity, so far as regards the treatment of the lower animals. To have softened towards their neighbours and dependents, the cruel patricians of Nero’s reign needed the greatest miracle of the Christian religion. The actual reception of the code of Christ by the men of old Rome is evidence enough that there was no mere human agency at work. We may estimate the magnitude of the task Christianity had to accomplish by marking the condition of the shores which its tide has failed to overflow. Up to the present it would seem, in Spain and Italy at least, the high-water mark of mercy stops short of the animals which serve us. “To them Christianity has no duties,” they say. The women and children of Italy do not think for a moment that they are not justified in torturing the trapped wolves and foxes the shepherds have taken, just as our sailors used to torment sharks. “What rights have such naughty beasts?” say they.
The long, stern contention of the men of the North against the rigour of the elements, or some other profound cause, has produced in the Teutonic races a tenderness of heart, and a sympathy with every phase of wrong, which have made the Anglo-Saxon race the pioneers of mercy throughout the whole world.
The progress of Christianity was assured when the men of the North were converted; and if they owe to warmer climates the message of the Friend of man, they have in their turn blessed the birth lands of the Gospel with the broader humanity which has help for everything that lives and suffers.
Elsworth was amazed to find how the bull-fight cultus had permeated and moulded every Spanish mind. That it was a pastime, he knew; that it was a religion, he did not imagine till he had lived in Spain. The very landscapes were cruel; the mountains and rocks had no softness, they were all angles, with stern, hard outlines that seemed reflected in the Spanish nature. Man, modified by his surroundings, often formed the subject of his meditations. Here, if anywhere, cruelty would be apotheosized! The railway journey to Madrid, and the landscape of the Escorial threw a light on many chapters of Spanish history which had often seemed hard to understand.
Having reached Madrid in due course he made some necessary purchases. First of all he bought a bicycle from Singer’s agents in the Puerta del Sol, also some good road maps and all the necessary tools and materials for repairing any accident that might happen to his machine. Then a good medicine chest and some well-selected medical appliances to enable him to be useful to any sick folk he might fall in with. A few books, dictionaries, grammars, and guides were added to his slender baggage and sent forward to Granada to the Hotel Washington Irving, where he determined to remain till he should decide his future course of life. He knew the cholera was raging at this city, and without rashness, yet with confidence in God and the wisdom of sanitary precautions which he should adopt, he decided to do what he could to help the dreadful misery that hung over the unfortunate city. His work at St. Bernard’s had familiarized him with the terrible disease on its last visitation of London, and he trusted to the measures which had been followed there to keep him from danger in Spain. At Madrid he wrote to his father, telling him the exact state of affairs, and assuring him that he had fled from temptation that could not be safely parreyed with, but was better conquered by flight.
A few months later he received a reply from the Major, who so far from being annoyed at his son’s conduct, praised him for it.
“You have done what the Lord Gautama Buddha felt compelled to do. When he left his royal home, and in the night passing through the dimly lighted pavilions where the sleeping Nātch girls lay, conceived an overpowering loathing for worldly pleasure, and was assailed in vain at the outset of his great renunciation by the voice of the tempter Māra urging him to cling to all the good things he was giving up, he set an example which I rejoice to know my son has followed. You are seeking the Nirvana. Do not think yourself singular in this step; one cannot be saved without a renunciation.”
Elsworth thought of a higher example and a nobler Prince, who left His throne to teach us the way of salvation; but was glad he had the approbation of his father. No one else except his lawyers, knew of his whereabouts; and he asked his father and agents not to give the curious inquirer any clue to his place of retreat.
Ever since as a boy he had read “Washington Irving” and Mr. Prescott’s “Conquest of Granada,” he had longed to see that celebrated city of which one Spanish proverb declares, “He is loved of God who lives in Granada,” and another, that “He who has not seen Granada has seen nothing.”
George Borrow’s books on the Spanish gipsies, their customs, and their curious language had fascinated him, and made him anxious some day to see these strange people for whom he had acquired a singular liking. The Spanish character has in it something strangely akin to the Puritan severity, honesty, and fibre of the English race, and no true Englishman can read the history of the conquests of Peru and Mexico without feeling his heart go forth towards those brave followers of Pizarro and Cortez, who seemed possessed of a character so much like our own in their invincible courage, daring, and hardihood in dealing with difficulties.
Elsworth had Puritan blood in him, inherited from his mother, more than one of whose ancestors had fought for England’s liberties under the great Protector. Good blood has the peculiarity of helping its possessor at a critical turn in life; and at this juncture in Elsworth’s history it served to stimulate him with something of the nerve force that enabled his forefathers to cast off the trammels of a licentious and drunken age, and go forth to a purer atmosphere for their souls’ salvation. He knew from many an old book treasured at home, the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, and what they had done for what the world called a mere idea. His favourite book, the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” came to his aid. Was he not, like Christian, setting forth from the City of Destruction? And so one bright autumn day he found himself in the famous city, the Queen of Cities, as Ibn-Batuta calls it.
The Arab writers used to say it was a fragment of heaven that had fallen to the earth. Elsworth had not gone forth into a waste, howling wilderness; he did not see there was any use in making himself wretched. He wanted, if possible, to do some good; and as he knew the language of the Gitanos, he thought if he could devote himself to their interests for a while in a missionary way, he would be the happier for being useful in his retirement. For he had great faith in the eternal freshness of the New Testament, and he concluded that its doctrines were as potent, as life-giving now as when they first shed their beams on a benighted world; he was determined that now religious liberty was permitted in Spain he would circulate the Caló New Testament amongst the gipsies, and do what he could to bring them to its teaching.
He took a couple of charmingly situated rooms in a venerable house on the banks of the Darro, looking down upon an old bridge which spanned the golden stream that comes down from the Sierra Nevada. The Alhambra Hill was close by, and the old city, rich with historic memories, in the plain below. He had little difficulty in ingratiating himself with the Gitanos. Knowing their language so well, they insisted that he must be of their race; and his dark complexion, fine eyes, and jet-black hair made it almost useless for him to deny that he was of gipsy stock. They argued that he must have their blood in his veins, even though he might not know it.
He soon became very popular, and having no prejudice, but being of a thoroughly cosmopolitan mind, it was not long before he was looked upon as one of themselves. His hospital life helped him, and he soon became at home in the Sacro Monte.
The gipsy quarter of Granada is one of the great sights of the place, and is the most romantic spot one can imagine. The pencil of a Doré and the pen of a Théophile Gautier have made it familiar enough to students of Spain and its people.
CHAPTER XXV.
“WHAT’S BECOME OF WARING?”
Oh, never star
Was lost here but it rose afar!
Look east, where whole new thousands are!
In Vishnu-land what Avatar!
– Browning.
Two years had passed away since Elsworth’s disappearance, and a little party of house physicians and surgeons – all young men and recently qualified – were sitting round the roaring fire in the snug quarters of the senior house surgeon at our hospital, discussing the sad fate of their old comrade. Young Harvey Bingley – a thoughtful and cultivated man, who, besides passing his exams, with credit, found time and inclination for literary pursuits, and especially loved to dig into Robert Browning’s poetry and extract a nugget from time to time – propounded the theory that perhaps Elsworth had gone off like Waring in Browning’s poem. Nobody saw the allusion, because nobody there knew anything of Browning; but Bingley was always worth listening to when he got on his hobby, so he was required to explain.
“Well, you see, the poem opens with the question, —
‘What’s become of Waring
Since he gave us all the slip,
Chose land-travel or seafaring,
Boots and chest, or staff and scrip,
Rather than pace up and down
Any longer London town?’
“He is described in the poem as walking with two or three friends one snowy night in December, when suddenly he was missed from the little company of students, who were returning home from a supper party, and none of them saw him again, nor could anything be learned of his whereabouts till years after, when one of his friends, sailing by Trieste, caught a glimpse of the lost Waring’s face under a great grass hat, in a fruit-boat, offering to trade with the English brig: caught that glimpse, and nothing more, as the boat which bore him went off —
‘Into the rosy and golden half o’ the sky to overtake the sun.’”
“How romantic!” exclaimed several of the party.
“Yes,” said the junior house physician; “very like young Sapsford; he disappeared just that way, after a supper party, and was not heard of till several days after, and then he was found in a boat off Margate jetty, with his landlady’s daughter!”
“Shut up!” cried Dr. Aubrey; “you’ve no poetry or sentiment in you – not a bit. You are saturated with ‘Mark Twain,’ and it’s blasphemy to quote Browning in your ribald hearing!”
“Do you think Elsworth has gone into the fruit business ‘in the rosy half of the sky?’” meekly asked Maberley the dresser.
“I’ve no idea,” said Bingley; “but I have known things quite as strange as that. By the way, you were all so anxious to laugh at my poetry that you didn’t wait to hear the dénouement.”
“Oh, isn’t it over?” asked a groggy individual on the sofa, smoking a churchwarden. “How could he get back out of the rosy sky?”
“That I can’t say; but he did, and is now living in a pretty villa on Hampstead Heath, is very fat and jolly, and sketches in fine weather ‘bits’ which he exhibits at the Academy.”
“Then I say it’s a beastly shame,” cried Ryder, the “Resident Acc.,” “to come to a public place like Hampstead and dissipate all that beautiful poetry and rend asunder those rosy skies and appear as a fat sketcher amongst donkey boys and nursemaids, to say nothing of girls’ schools. It’s indecent, and Robert Browning ought to go at him for damages. I would! ‘Avatar’ indeed.”
“Now, joking apart,” said Dr. Aubrey, “don’t you think poor Elsworth got a sudden sense of disgust with his rackety life, which was always, I thought, rather assumed – never sat upon him quite naturally – and in a moment resolved to cut it all? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear that he had settled down in some quiet nook abroad, and was leading a philosophical life. Do you remember Bartley Coleman? You do, don’t you, Fourneaux? – he was of your year. You remember how promising he was? We all made sure he would take the medical scholarship. One fine morning he was missed, and nobody heard of him here till Dr. Sales went into a little grocer’s shop in a Scotch village for some fish-hooks, and was served by the missing Coleman. His father had become bankrupt while he was a student, had a fit of apoplexy soon after, and died, leaving a widow and five girls unprovided for. Poor Coleman heard the call of duty, laid down the scalpel and took up the cheese-cutter, and so supported his mother and his sisters. Noble wasn’t it?”
“Oh, I say, Aubrey,” said Maberley, “you don’t mean to imply that Elsworth is keeping a chandler’s shop?”
“I imply nothing. I say we know very little of the under-currents of half the men’s lives we are familiar with; we see the surface-water and what floats on it; that is all. The wonder to me is how we keep between the banks as well as we do. Some from inclination, others from duty, more from defective control, get away from the old course, wander off down the rapids, under the rocks, and disappear. Is it any marvel? For my own part, there are times when I long to cast off the restrictions of your so-called civilized existence, and go with a gun or a lasso to the Pampas and the virgin forests.”
“Yes, all very fine, and make the welkin ring with cries for your slippers and your grog when tired and heated with the chase. After a very few months of that sort of work, the fit would cool down; and the next thing that the world would see of you, you would be dining with your father at the Fishmongers’ banquet, eating your turtle and drinking your très sec like the rest of the ‘domine diriges.’”
“I believe he has gone off with some girl,” said ugly little beetle-browed Mills, the clinical clerk; “or somebody’s wife more likely still.”
“Well, you may comfort yourself, Mills, that that indiscretion will never happen to you. I could believe it of a cash-box, but there isn’t a woman living who would elope with you – married or single. You will never create that scandal.”
At this moment a knock was heard at the door, and a nurse put her head into the room and, addressing one of the house surgeons, told him the patient Green, in Isabella ward, had consented to undergo the operation which he had suggested, and then added: “Sister says she thinks he is dying fast, and are you going to operate?”
“Going to operate! Rather think I was. Don’t you know, Nurse, this is my first capital operation? Do you think I am going to lose the chance?”
“Then, sir, Sister told me to ask you if I had better let the chaplain know?”
“Chaplain be hanged!” he cried. “Certainly not! It would only depress the poor devil. No! no! Plenty of brandy! Keep him up! Cheer him all you can; tell him it is only a trifling, every-day sort of affair, and he will be well in a jiffy. You may send for his wife.”
“Oh, sir, she has been waiting about the hospital all day.”
“All right, then! Now, gentlemen, to business. You shall see me do something pretty. Bishop says I may do it all myself as soon as the ether is given. Is Bishop in the wards?”
“No, I saw him in the pathologist’s room with Crowe an hour ago, and he said he should be here but part of the day. I’ll tell him, shall I?” asked a dresser.
“Do!”
The bell rang for the operation, to assemble the students, some of whom said “It was a beastly shame to torture a poor wretch who hadn’t a chance of getting over it.”
“Ah, you won’t talk like that when you are house surgeon (H.S. they always termed it) yourself. You will be glad to operate on your own father if you can’t get anybody else. Besides, what are hospitals for, if not to qualify us for our work? If people don’t want us to learn all we can from them, why don’t they stay at home and die? The parish doctor won’t disturb their latter moments with operations.”
And so, while the case was being discussed by the novelty-hunting lads, and the grim tools of the surgeons were being selected and placed on a pretty little table by the side of the couch in the theatre, and covered with a white napkin; – while the nurses were assembling who had to assist, and the surgeon refreshing his memory by a last peep at the text-book directing the steps of the operation; – while the poor patient, who, after much worrying, had at last consented to undergo what he was told was a trifling affair that would be certain to cure him – an agonised young woman, with a baby at her breast, was pacing up and down the courtyard of the “cathedral of surgery,” as the Sunday papers called it, feeling that her poor husband was fast leaving her and his little home, and much doubting if she should have given that young doctor her consent to cut and hack the sinking frame of the father of her babe. But what was she to do? Had not five well speaking, kind-looking gentlemen told her that very morning it was the only chance of saving him? Did not the pretty nurse and the ladylike sister urge her to do just whatever the doctor in charge of the case advised? There was only her own heart, her sad misgivings, standing between her and the operation that they said was to give her Jimmy back to health. She had yielded; it was to be done. She had seen him, and kissed him; but her heart told her she would see him and hear his voice no more in life.
A kind porter in the place let her sit down in his room and await the result. Before nightfall, she was a widow. The announcement was made to her by one of the dressers, who coupled his bad news with a request from the authorities for leave to make a post-mortem examination. For James Green had yet something to contribute to science and St. Bernard’s; he had given his life; had presented a rising young surgeon with his first opportunity for a great and interesting operation. He had still something more to bestow – his dead body. It was considered a grievous oversight, and a wrong to the institution, if a patient who had died there failed to make his or her appearance on the post-mortem table at four o’clock the next day, not only that it might be seen and demonstrated by skilled pathologists just where and how the operation had gone wrong, but for the sake of all the beautiful and instructive things that might be shown in brain, or heart, or lungs. For statistical purposes, for treatises being written, for papers for learned societies on all and every of the ailments of humanity, it was ill fortune to let a sectio cadaveris slip, as one never knew what one might be losing. They had an euphemistic way of asking the relatives’ permission for what they termed a “P.M.”
“You don’t object to a slight examination, do you, just to find out the real cause of death, so as to make the death certificate all right?”
Who could object? Few understood what it all meant, fewer thought they had any power to object; so the cases were rare where the ruse failed.
There is a widespread feeling amongst the people against post-mortem examinations. There is a vague apprehension that portions of their deceased friend’s anatomy may appear “in spirits in a vial,” in some museum or other. When the remains of the relative come back from the hospital, it is unpleasant to feel doubts as to their integrity. Visions of important portions of their internal economy lying perdu in back gardens of students’ lodgings, the prey of the too inquisitive cat or investigating terrier, are not altogether baseless. Hundreds of back gardens in London doubtless do contain such material, as we have frequent proof. Many thousands of museum shelves are loaded with preparations of such departed friends. It is doubtless, in the abstract, absurd to object to these common practices; but when it comes home to a mother to ask how she would like her dead child’s remains disposed of, it is perfectly natural, and not at all absurd, to suppose that with her whole heart, she would earnestly demand that they should be reverently interred in Christian ground, and be as little mutilated as possible.
The Jews are very reluctant to allow post-mortem examinations on their relatives; and, when such a thing is unavoidable, as by coroner’s order, an official from the synagogue is present to see that nothing is abstracted. It has often happened that the friends have discovered that portions of the corpse have been withheld or lost; and, as such detention of human remains is forbidden by law, the authorities have had to compensate the relatives by handsome sums towards the funeral expenses. Nevertheless, one shilling will still purchase a healthy, adult human brain to dissect quietly at home; and the emptiness of the dead person’s head is not always a cause of surprise. A judicious porter in the P.M. room has often found the cranial cavity a good receptacle for the liver, thus balancing matters comfortably.
