Edward Berdoe
St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student
Naturally the authorities did not at first relish suggestions from a foreigner about improved drainage and water supply, though when they came to know the clever young surgeon, and had listened to his sensible proposals anent accumulations of refuse and dust, they gradually adopted many of his suggestions. Daily he spent many hours visiting amongst the most poverty stricken and dirty inhabitants. He spent the greater part of his income in helping his patients with suitable food and clothing. His missionary work was done by a few kind words here and there; with loving counsels and the sympathy which comes with a sense of the higher relationship of man to man through the All-Father, he won his way to the hearts of all. Virtue went out of him, and health and peace seemed to follow his steps. He was as much at home with the Catholic people of Granada as he would have been in the courts and alleys of London; he was as welcome in the homes of the atheist and gipsy, the red Republican and anarchist, as with the family of the Presbyterian vice-consul; and all because the pervading sense of God’s love for man had taken possession of his life. His sympathies were too wide for the influence of bigotry; he was as a traveller from a far country, who has long been homeless and a wanderer, not at all in the humour to trouble himself with the squabbles of his vestry, or the quarrels of the political clubs of the town he has come back to rest in.
Elsworth had recovered the lost idea of a loving God and Saviour of men. What to him did it matter, all these hair-splitting dogmas and wranglings of theologians? the recovered treasure was too precious to neglect for the ornaments of the casket in which it was contained.
So he daily went about doing good. By his constant visitation of the people he was able to detect the earliest stages of the pestilence which was destroying so many; then by prompt and judicious treatment he was often successful in arresting its progress. His fame spread, and he was often called in to attend rich sufferers, from whom he refused to take any fees, as he considered himself the servant of the poor. If they chose to make him presents, as they often did, he took them with the understanding that their gifts should be devoted to charitable purposes.
He often went to Mr. MacAlister’s home, at the Vice-Consulate, close by the cathedral. The old gentleman was rather afraid of infection; but as the doctor always changed his clothing before paying visits to his friends, he took his word for it that there was no cause for alarm.
He rented at a very low rate, through the kindness of a member of the municipal council, an old monastery which had been taken by the Government on the expulsion of the monks, and was now let to a furniture dealer; and turned it into a small but serviceable hospital for cholera patients. Funds were readily provided for its support, and there was no difficulty in inducing sufferers to avail themselves of it, as was the case with the great hospitals of the place, which they dreaded to enter. They knew they would be safe in Doctor Elsworth’s hands; he wanted to try no experiments upon them, and was not (as they foolishly thought the other doctors were) in league with the Government for getting rid of them.
Mr. MacAlister’s daughters nobly came forward and helped in the nursing. They found amongst their English and American friends resident in the town abundant means for carrying on the plan, without any Spanish assistance in this branch of the work. Spanish ladies, even if available, would have been of little service. Even Spanish nuns are not very valuable as nurses, and the best Catholic charities are recruited from France. Spanish women can do the devotional part of the work, they say; but that is about all they are good for. The bringing up of a Spanish woman tends to make her ornamental merely, and surely she is of the loveliest of her sex. She spends the greater part of her day in bed, rises and adorns herself for dinner; then the tertulia, with its music and dancing winds up her waking hours, and by midnight she is again in bed. This is poor material for making sick nurses or sisters of mercy.
They had only twenty beds in Elsworth’s hospital. Their principal disinfectant was fresh air, for our surgeon was not greatly in love with carbolic acid and the other disinfecting fetishes, which are probably about as powerful for evil and powerless for good as any which the African venerates.
CHAPTER XXX.
SISTER AGNES LEAVES ST. BERNARD’S
So all the more we need be strong
Against this false and seeming right;
Which none the less is deadly wrong
Because it glitters, clothed in light.
Procter.
The prince who asked, “Who is she?” when anything went wrong in his kingdom, was not far out in his estimate of the power of woman for mischief; but he would have been wiser had he asked the same question when he heard of any new movement for good. The fact is that, as Coventry Patmore says, women have the power, would they but use it, to make “brutes men, and men divine.” When the selfishness, the thoughtless cruelty, and the greed of men have culminated in some deep-seated, persistent social wrong, it may be taken for granted that the evil will not be uprooted till a woman’s whole-hearted, unselfish courage has taken it in hand. Mr. Ruskin somewhere complains that “no one pays the least attention to what he says on social topics, except a few nice girls, and they can do nothing.” He should not have said that, because he knows better – no one more certainly than he – that his “few nice girls” will bring to pass all that is good in his teaching sooner or later.
Women mend what men mar; – everything, from our linen to our laws.
Sister Agnes knew all this – knew that it was just as certainly some woman’s place to set to work and remedy this shameful abuse of Charity’s holiest work, as it would be her work to restore peace and order to a home wrecked by a man’s selfishness and violence. The more she thought of the matter, the more indignant she felt that no man could be brought to see the awful wrong of exploiting the miseries and diseases of the poor for the purpose of adorning the brows of men with academic laurels. Surely never in the history of this world was so cruel a mockery of charity! Asked for bread, to give a stone! What was this but to give disease for health, maiming for cure, torture for ease, and death for life? And then to go round to those who, in the name of the Healer, were ever ready to sacrifice their substance and give alms out of their penury, for the means to bring more victims to the altar of their Kali! Did not every sister and nurse in the place, with feminine penetration, see through all these shams? Did they not revolt in their souls, day by day and hour by hour, at this mockery of mercy, till, by long use, they forgot to feel the wrong? She had mentioned her misgivings to many men, clergymen chiefly, who saw it all – saw just where the mischief lay, but thought it inseparable from the work that had to be done; knew of its existence, but could see no remedy for it. They declared that every good thing in this world must be bought with a price. But was not this price too high to pay? They did not know, they did not think anybody could even set about estimating that. They did not like to encourage thought or discussion of the question – money was hard enough to get for the hospitals as it was. Breathe but the least on the idea of their utility, and the charitable public, all too ready to withhold its gifts, would cease to subscribe. Hospitals were costly things to establish, still costlier to maintain efficiently. “Let be,” they said; “we can do nothing.” Men always do talk like that in face of such difficulties, but, fortunately, their arguments never yet held back a woman who had set her heart on a great work of love.
Sister Agnes gradually evolved an idea of a great hospital richly endowed and well officered, ruled by a competent governing body, and animated throughout by one idea —to heal by the shortest and most effectual methods, the sufferers who sought its portals; to take as the guiding principle of all the work done there, not possibly better methods for better patients, but the best existing methods for the present occupants of its beds. The motto of the place to be, “Honour all men.” A revolution indeed! A work of such magnitude that its inception seemed Quixotic!
Things, however, had come to this pass that she could no longer retain her position at St. Bernard’s; and feeling that she could do nothing there to elaborate her scheme, she left the hospital, and took time to consider what her next step should be. She did not leave a bit too soon; things had been rather unpleasant of late. There were several patients who, at a hint from her, had taken themselves off from St. Bernard’s with all their limbs about them, who would have gone out minus one or other of these useful appendages had they remained much longer, and the loss of these valuable opportunities had very properly been charged to Sister Agnes’s account. She was accused of not showing sufficient interest in the welfare of the place.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE GOSPEL OF WORK
God says, “Sweat
For foreheads;” men say, “Crowns:” and so we are crowned;
Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel,
Which snaps with a secret spring.
Elizabeth B. Browning.
If to the city sped – what waits him there?
To see profusion that he must not share;
To see ten thousand baneful arts combined,
To pamper luxury and thin mankind.
Goldsmith (“Deserted Village”).
What is the perfect life for a Christian man or woman? It was settled once for all by our Lord. “Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor” – and live in a cave, on the top of a column, in a monastic cell, or beg for daily bread from door to door? Would that fulfil the command? The nineteenth century has no place for St. Simeon’s Pillar; the cells of the monks are turned to other uses than that of contemplation, which is not quite in the way of the age of steam and the telegraph; and begging and alms-giving are denounced by students of social economy. What is the precise application, then, of our Saviour’s teaching to the present day? Though deaths from starvation and terrible tales of privation are not uncommon in our great cities, and the condition of the unskilled working classes is particularly unsatisfactory, there is no question that our poor even at their worst are better off by far than those of our Lord’s time. Admitting the work that remains to be done in helping to raise the lower sections of society, it is in a moral rather than a material direction that our efforts must be exerted; and though our Lord’s command to sell all and feed the poor is not perhaps to be interpreted literally, because the literal is not now the highest interpretation of the injunction, yet never was there a time when it was more the duty of Christian people to make great, ay, the greatest sacrifices for their fellow-men than the present. The law provides against the starvation of any human being dwelling in our midst; but it is souls rather than bodies which languish for food, and are fain to be filled with carrion. The separation which many years has been going on between class and class; the locating the workers in quarters given over to dirt, squalor, and dullness; the exodus of the cultivated minds to more congenial sections of our greater towns, where the signs of labour and the noise of work cannot disturb or annoy them; the drawing off the classes from the masses, depriving the poor man of the society, the encouragement, the teaching, the example, the brightness, the wealth, and the culture of the more leisured – it is this which is slowly but surely working, not alone the degradation of the deserted people, but a terrible punishment for the deserters. There is not a work of art, not a lofty aspiration, not a burst of song, not a beautiful face, nor a well-stored intellect, but is part of the heritage of the poor. We have as much right to cut off the poor man’s oxygen or his nitrogen as to deprive him of any of the elements needful for the nourishment of his soul.
Walk through the unlovely streets where the worker dwells in London. Note the changes that have taken place in them during the past fifty years. Once there were mansions in them, where their employers dwelt. Now these deserted places are let off in tenements, since their former occupants have long ago left them for brighter and wealthier parts of the town. Grim, dirty, and neglected parish churches stand in the midst of graveyards filled with the tumble-down monuments of rich residents whose descendants never visit them, scorning to go east of Temple Bar, even to pay their respects to the tombs of their ancestors. Within these temples of prayer the monuments round the walls tell sadly of better days and a prosperity that contrasts oddly with the decadence of the present. Hard work here for the clergy, with much begging from distant and richer parishes to maintain the services and ministrations of the Church, even in their crippled form. True, money is sent from the West, but where are the workers? The men and women who could help the clergy in a hundred ways to mitigate the evil surroundings? And Lady Millefleurs will have to know, sooner or later, that she has not charity, though she sell all her goods to feed the poor, and give her body to be burned, while she will not give herself a living sacrifice to humanity. How is she to do this? How is she to fulfil the command to sell all she has and give to the poor? Simple enough. Give up Belgrave Square and settle in Bethnal Green! Forsake Tyburnia and dwell in Whitechapel! Then, and not till then, will she follow her Master’s commands. Very unpleasant, doubtless; but consider what she would learn. At a great cost she has acquired much human knowledge of a kind, not enough to keep her, perhaps, from falling into the error of the often-quoted lady, who wondered why the poor who could not get bread did not live on those nice twopenny cakes to be had in Bond Street. What good would be done by this retrogression from progress? Just think of a few ways of helping the poor. Look at the East End and suburban vestries, boards of guardians, and public bodies generally. Why are they so corrupt, so hard to move, so gluttonous and backward? That is not far to seek. Consider the mental calibre, the social status, the education and tastes of the men who compose them too generally. The gentry are far away, where they only see the poor as rare and interesting objects on which to bestow Bibles, blankets, soup, and occasional recitations and songs. They spend their days in places where the clergy are compelled to preserve with care a few exotic paupers as specimens, that it may be demonstrated now and then that “the poor ye have always with you.” Granny, in her clean cap, white apron, and neat gown, sitting in a well-scrubbed room, reading the Bible with the help of a pair of horn spectacles, by the side of a not depressingly low fire, is all the idea of poverty with which many a high-born lady has any acquaintance. How about “slumming” which Mr. Punch declared recently was so fashionable? There never was very much of it; there is less now, and that doesn’t count. It never did the least good, nor was it likely it should. The great wrong done to the poor by the complete alienation of the rich cannot be condoned by spasmodic visits to their wretched homes by ladies and gentlemen, who go to see them as they go to the Zoo; by their occasional presence at the opening of a bazaar for a poor church; nor by the exhibition of their well-appointed equipages to the admiring gaze of the denizens of Tourniquet’s Rents. This wrong cannot be remedied by gifts of money, nor by loans of pictures and objets d’art.
It happened that just as Sister Agnes left St. Bernard’s, a number of ladies of wealth and position had formed themselves into a community, without any distinctly religious badge or dogmas, for the purpose of residing together in an East London district. They took a large, old-fashioned house in the Commercial Road, called in a skilful architect and a builder, had it put in thorough repair and properly adapted to the purposes of colonization by the well-to-do. They were women of ample leisure, intelligence, and business capacity, and were impressed by the idea that if one would help the poor and ignorant, it could only be done effectually by teaching them how to help themselves. They did not propose to inculcate the religious opinions of any particular section of the Christian Church; they wore no distinctive dress, had no politics in particular, and were only actuated by a desire to see for themselves what was the real life and what were the real needs of the working people with whom they went to reside. They knew that in a great measure the deplorable unloveliness of East London was due to the fact that it was deserted by people of wealth and capacity for helping their neighbours, and that the best way of doing good in the locality was work and residence there. “The problem was how to make the working people realize their spiritual and social solidarity with the rest of the capital and the kingdom; how to revive their sense of citizenship, with its privileges which they have lost, and its responsibilities which they have forgotten. Among these privileges should be education, rational amusement, and social intercourse, best supplied by local clubs, with their various guilds, classes, and societies. Among the duties, on the other hand, which require to be revived, thrift and prudence stand pre-eminent; and thrift and prudence can only be taught by those who will associate with the people and thus induce them to face the elementary laws of economy. This is especially the case with regard to that population question to which all the other problems are subordinate. The levity with which lads and girls enter upon matrimony without any adequate provision (a levity which would be criminal if it were not so unconscious), can only be met by convincing them that prudence in this matter is a duty which is as fully recognized in other grades of society as it is ignored by themselves. The sympathy and example of educated people living in their midst does more good in all these ways than the foundation of any number of new charitable institutions. Destitute London requires their personal help as well as their subscriptions.”
Such was the plan which had worked so admirably at Oxford House, Bethnal Green, established by a number of Oxford men for just this work; and these good women rightly argued: If such an institution worked by men has been found so useful, how much more effectual would be something on similar, but less ambitious lines, if worked by women! Reform the women, you reform the men and the next generation. Make the home life what it should be, and you have made virtue and decency, not only possible, but easy and pleasant.
It was brave of these good Oxford men to go and live in the gloomiest part of surely the gloomiest and poorest parish of East London; but though they might stimulate the brains of the people amongst whom they laboured, and do good in a thousand ways, it was impossible for them to hope to achieve the influence of women in the home. The men could capture the outworks; women were required to secure the citadel. So they spent their money liberally, and went to work at the courts and alleys that run off right and left of this great thoroughfare from the Docks to the City. One of their great ideas was an hospital for Women and Children – not a place for teaching doctors their business, or giving them scope for their fads, – not “happy hunting grounds” for “cases,” but wards for the restoration to health with all possible speed of sick folk of the neighbourhood who could not effectually be tended at home. It was an axiom with the Lady Head of the Home, which was called Nightingale House, that no sick person should be removed to the hospitals who could be effectually and comfortably treated at home. She argued that we do great harm by making hospitals the universal resource of the lower classes, even of those who have sufficiently comfortable homes. She maintained with great force that much of the tenderness of family life is fostered, nay, created, by the mutual care of parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, in seasons of illness and in the hour of death; and held that if we deduct from our feelings all which we owe to sources of this kind, the residue would represent all that we can expect from the working classes under the present system. Thus if the home were not over-crowded and the disease not infectious, she held that it should be nursed and doctored in the family. As much kindly aid and sympathy, as much attention and skill as possible these ladies lent, but there was no removal from home unless absolutely necessary. Sister Agnes was just the woman to be matron of this hospital for women and children; and as the plan was completely to her mind, she was soon installed in her new office.
Sister Agnes had made many friends amongst her patients at St Bernard’s, and many of them and their relatives came to see her at her new home, and sought her advice in their troubles and difficulties. Her great experience and ability enabled her to penetrate to the bottom of many a little mystery. She often wondered how she could so long have been cognisant of the things that took place and had not sooner rebelled. Often a husband or wife who was a patient at the old place would write home, and the letters would be brought to her for her opinion. A poor carman at the docks one day brought her a letter which his wife had sent him the previous day. The poor man did not know what to make of it. His wife had gone to the hospital merely on account of loss of appetite and strength, and the doctors, after “overhauling her like a barge as was in dry dock,” as he expressed it, had come to the conclusion that she had a tumour “somewhere internal,” and if she did not have it taken out she would soon die.
“In course, Mum,” said he, “the doctors ought to know best; but my belief all along is they be nothing but practisin’ on her.”
Then he gave the Sister the letter his wife had sent him; which was expressed in Mrs. Stubbins’ forcible vernacular. The dialect of a denizen of the London slums abounds in idioms, which were intelligible enough to Sister Agnes from long acquaintance, but she could not help smiling as she read the poor woman’s epistle.
“St Bernard’s Hospital, 16th July.
“Dear Jack, —
“I write these few lines for to let you now how I am gettin along in this plaice. I have bean hear six weaks to-morrer, which is little Jemmie’s birfday. I ain’t undergond the hoperation as I cum for yet, bekos the doctor says my sistem ain’t reddy fur to stand it yet. My patients is allmost gon, Jack, with waitin in suspends so long. Sumtimes I begin to think as the doctors ain’t acting straight with me. They makes a dredful hurtin examinashun everry morning with more’n a dozzun yung stoodents a-lookin on, which ain’t proper in my opinyun, and they talks a lot of Latin and says it is a verry pretty case. One feller sed it was you-neek or somethin of that sort, and Doctor Stanforth would be back in a fortnit and must see it. As for phizzik I swer I ain’t had a drop of anythink but pepermint water sins in this plaice I’ve bin; but I’ve bin pulld about shameful, as ain’t fit for no respectful marrid woman, for what objek I can’t for the life on me see. Now, Jack, do mind and keep Lizzie at her scholin, and don’t let Billy and Polly run wild in the streets. I don’t like meself at all in this plaice, and ef the tumour aint sune tuk out I shall bunk it, so I tell yer strayt. I wish you’d ask Dr. Phelps what thear littel gaim is hear. I beleaf I am only kep as a speciment, bekos my cais is curous; anyhow, I ain’t a-bein dun no good to, and they’ll find I’m sloped afore long. 2 on em in saim ward as me bunked it last week.
“Your lovin wife,“Matilda Stubbins.”
“Now, Mum,” said the man, “what I wanted to ask you was this. Mrs. Foster, our relieving officer’s wife, I have heerd tell had a tumour in her inside, asking your pardon for speaking like that afore a lady; but you don’t mind me, I hopes, and she went to a ladies’ ’orspital in the West End, and they was a-going to take her pretty nigh all to bits, as the sayin’ is, tellin’ her she’d be a dead woman in no time if it warn’t done; and while the poor thing was a-prayin’ and a-screwin’ of her courage up for to have it done, a lady told her how she had bin cured of the same thing by drinkin’ of gallons and gallons of still water, think they called it.”
“Distilled water,” said the Sister.
“Maybe your right, lady; anyways, she drunk pretty nigh a hogshead of it, besides wearing a tin bottle full of it hot round her innards, savin’ your presence, and she got well in three months and the tumour went right away. I have heerd Mr. Foster say so hisself. Now I wants to ask you if so be as you thinks as my poor Tilly could be cured with these ’ere waters like that?”
“Well, I can’t tell you that, Stubbins, but if you like I will get a clever doctor I know to see her, and tell us all about the case; but my advice to you, from what I know of St. Bernard’s, is to get her away at once. If the operation must be done, we will find some other hospital, after we have tried what we can do with less severe means.”
Visions of similar cases crowded in upon the good Sister’s recollection – of eviscerated creatures in whom no tumour was discovered to remove; of cases where, on the post-mortem table, sponges, and even instruments, had been discovered carelessly sown up in the patients after operation, and had caused their deaths. Had not Dr. Stanforth ever after said, with a look full of meaning, when about to perform this operation, “Count your sponges, sister!”
Mrs. Stubbins discharged herself from St. Bernard’s without waiting for further treatment, and actually recovered her health perfectly, unassisted even by “still waters.” She always declares that her doctors were like “Helen’s Babies,” who wanted to see the “wheels go round,” and was glad they had not gratified their curiosity on her “works.” Poor woman! she forgave them the wrong they had intended to do her, for in common with her class she believed it was somehow meant for her good, only “they are so fond of hacking folks about at them places.” Good-natured creatures, they sacrifice their poor skins, organs, and limbs, usually with generosity, when a great institution requires it, though the general practitioner cannot touch them with a lancet without protest. It is the éclat does the business.
One day an old pavior smashed his hand. The surgeons at St. Bernard’s wanted to remove three fingers. Not before he had been to see Sister Agnes, he thought. Sister Agnes went in for conservative surgery, and told him to refuse his consent. How often had she known a simple method of dressing save the digits in such a case. In three months the man had the complete use of his hand as before the accident, but that didn’t console the house surgeon, whose fingers had itched “to make a neat little job of it.” The pavior was so grateful to the Sister for her advice that he begged her acceptance of his favourite linnet in a nice cage.
