Edward Berdoe
St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student
“Why does he stay so long in Granada?” asked Mildred.
“Oh, he is studying the language and the manners and customs of the gipsies; he has a printing press, and he prints books to give them. He has a school, and he teaches their children. He is writing, they say, a great work on the origin and the life of the Spanish gipsies; but we hear he is going back soon to his own country. He had a hospital down in the city for the cholera patients last year, and has been decorated by the king for his services in the epidemic. There will be many tears when he leaves us, señora.”
The exile dined with his friends at the hotel, and enlightened them all on many points of interest which a mere tourist would be certain to miss. Every one noticed the change in Elsworth. Even Mr. Crowe, with his hard, unsympathetic soul, could not help seeing that in him was a renewed man, “one who had been set apart by Nature (as he expressed it to his colleague afterwards) for some great work.” Mildred and Aunt Janet saw that here was a man called to be an apostle; called, like the men of Galilee, from their nets and money tables, to serve the highest purposes of God; and they longed to hear the story they knew he must have to tell. After dinner the ladies contrived to have a chat with him, while Mr. Crowe and Dr. Graves were walking on the terrace smoking. To no one had he spoken, during these years of retirement, of the causes which had led him away from his haunts and profession; but these sweet women, with their sympathy which invited his confidence, soon heard his story; and in listening to it Mildred felt as Desdemona when Othello told his own; and listening, loved. Here, she thought, is a man with a heart and a conscience! All her life had been spent amongst selfish seekers after fame, wealth, or the amusements of life; men who cared not whom they overthrew could they but climb themselves; men of genius, who cared no more for the troubles of their fellowmen than the heartless libertines for the victims of their pleasures. She remembered Moore’s lines: —
“Out on the craft – I’d rather be
One of those hinds that round me tread,
With just enough of sense to see
The noon-day sun that’s o’er my head, —
Than thou, with high-built genius cursed,
That hath no heart for its foundation,
Be all, at once, that’s brightest, worst,
Sublimest, meanest in creation!”
Here was a man who had left all and followed his Master; not as a missionary sent out by a society, with all the prestige and protection of his Church behind him, but who went forth to save his own soul and aid his brother man. This was devotion, true self-sacrifice, of which this age seems almost to have lost the idea. One cannot give a cup of cold water now-a-days to a thirsty child unless at the bidding of a committee. Our charity is done to order and by deputy. Elsworth’s way of going to work was like that of an early Christian, and savoured of real heroism; and women love heroes, because every woman has the germ of heroism in her own heart, and self-sacrifice is of her nature.
Mildred had found her ideal man. They talked of many things, but most of his hospital down in the city, and the next day they all went to see it, and many other of the charitable agencies of the town.
Of course Mr. Crowe was huffy and upset at the meeting, and at the reception which the ladies gave to the handsome young fellow whom they had discovered. He was jealous, too; for Mildred did not conceal the interest she felt in all that was shown her, and Mr. Crowe could not scoff down the good works of which he had evidence that day, though he tried hard to make game of any attempt to Christianize the gipsies, and protested it was a great pity to waste so many opportunities of investigating cholera germs and inoculations in such a favourable field.
Mildred set him down when he spoke contemptuously of Elsworth’s Gitano friends.
“Now, Mr. Crowe, you surprise me, as a deep student of natural phenomena, to hear you talk so. Don’t you know —
‘No creature’s made so mean
But that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate,
Its supreme worth’?”
Mr. Crowe did not think the game was worth the candle; besides, it would spoil the artists’ chances to civilize the gipsies.
Elsworth explained that had he attempted to experiment with the cholera patients, if he had been so inclined, he would have fared no better than the native doctors, who were suspected of propagating the disease for the Government, who wished to deplete the population.
“Yes,” said Aunt Janet, “can we wonder at the poor Neapolitans and Spaniards, in the late cholera epidemics, attacking the doctors with sticks and stones, declaring they were spreading the disease – as, in fact, they were – by these abominable vaccinations?”
“I hear that Pasteur’s hydrophobia cure is entirely discredited by the French experts,” said Mildred.
“It is,” replied Elsworth; “and anybody who believed that God, and not the devil, governs the world, might have predicted its failure from the infernal nature of the process for keeping up the supply of the vaccine. Just fancy, keeping in cages, a lot of dogs inoculated with the virus, to inoculate again a lot of rabbits, ready for use for any patient who might want the treatment!”
“Do you know, Mr. Elsworth,” said Mildred, “I am almost afraid to venture the opinion, yet it is a growing one with me, that what is called scientific medicine is a contradiction in terms. The human stomach is not a test-tube, and till we leave off treating it as a dyer treats his vats, we can’t expect to make any progress. So many things go to make up therapeutic treatment. How often have I heard my father say that he never could do any good unless the patient had full faith in him!”
“I fear you do not estimate very highly either the education you got at St. Bernard’s, or the benefits such institutions confer on the people,” said Mr. Crowe, in a rather sneering tone, when Elsworth had assented to Mildred’s remarks.
Dr. Graves maintained that the hospital education given at St. Bernard’s was second to none in Europe, and doubted if it were possible to improve on its methods, as far as they went. “What do you say, Mr. Elsworth?” he asked.
“I hold,” said Elsworth, “that all hospitals are only necessary evils in an imperfect state of society.”
“I have long held that opinion, too,” replied Mildred; “it seems to me that our poor people are far too ready to get rid of their sick and troublesome relatives.”
“Yes, nursing is rapidly becoming a lost art amongst the working people,” remarked Aunt Janet. “The instant their children, husbands, or wives get sick, they are packed off to one or other of the charities which compete for their favours and they are troubled with them no more till they are cured.”
“You mean till they recover?” said Mildred, with an arch look.
“Oh, we really do make some cures, though our Spanish friends are cruel enough to say, ‘El medico lleva la plata pero Dios es que sana!’ (the doctor takes the fee, but God works the cure.”)
“I fear our noble art is not more highly esteemed here than in England,” said Dr. Graves.
“England is the very Paradise of doctors; though the art of medicine, so far from making progress even there, bids fair to be destroyed by a noisy and arrogant school,” said Elsworth emphatically.
“You mean the ultra-physiological party which goes in for these hideous inoculations?” asked Mildred.
“I do,” he replied. “While I was a student at the hospital, I often remarked the contempt with which many of the physicians spoke of drugs and of the people who believed in them; and found it difficult to reconcile all they said with their practice amongst their private patients who went to their consulting rooms and always returned armed with prescriptions which they were instructed should be dispensed only at the most eminent pharmacies. At the hospital, peppermint water was the great remedy for every complaint, except where some new thing was in hand which wanted testing; but when the guinea-paying public were to be dealt with, they received the most formidable prescriptions, resulting ultimately in rows of medicine bottles.”
Mr. Crowe looked very cross at this, and would have replied with bitterness had it not been for the ladies. To make matters worse, Aunt Janet capped it.
“Yes, I remember Dr. Lee declaring at a meeting of medical men that drugs were a delusion and a sham; and that nothing but nature and a good nurse were wanted to cure any complaint amenable to treatment.”
“What did the others say?” asked Elsworth.
“Oh, they objected that it was all very well for a Royal Physician, who had reached the top of the ladder to talk like that, but that it would not work well for those who were still climbing.”
Wishing to divert the conversation into another channel, Mildred asked Elsworth if he did not think with her that the great cause of sickness amongst the poor was due to drink – in England, at all events.
He agreed that it was so, but attributed the craze for alcohol partly to the climate, and partly to the gradual degradation of the social conditions of life amongst the poor. The separation between the masses and the classes was more pronounced, he thought, in England than in any other country of which he knew anything.
“I don’t wonder at the poor creatures drinking,” said he; “it is the only way they have of satisfying the natural aspiration of mankind for the ideal!”
“You mean, we are all more or less poets, and alcohol develops the latent genius within us?” said Mildred.
“I do, and I can never tolerate the argument that a man who drinks makes a beast of himself, because the beast can have no desire to minister to a sense which he does not possess.”
“Then you would say, that the universal desire for some sort of intoxication is a proof of the higher and immortal nature of man,” said Mr. Crowe.
“In a certain degree, yes; because all error is a perversion of some truth. A booze of bad beer and a glass of gin do for the lower man what Shakespeare and Keats, Bacon and Macaulay do for the cultured man – lift him for a while from his sordid surroundings, and raise him to a Monte Cristo palace of beautiful imagery. Mind, this is all the more sinful, all the more degrading at last, because it is buying of the devil at the price of your soul what God would have given you in another and a better way, if you had asked Him.”
“Very pretty,” said Crowe, “but I don’t believe it a bit!”
Dr. Graves said he thought that the theory was as clever, yet as improbable, as that of an American friend of his, who held that all children told lies, because by nature their dramatic faculties were in advance of their moral principles. Fibbing children were on this theory all premature poets.
And so the symposium ended, and the little party broke up.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
MILDRED FINDS HER WORK
“This is not our work,” you say, “this is the work of men.” Be it so if you like. Let them be the hands to do it: but who, if not women, are to be the hearts of the redemption of the poor from social wrong?
– Stopford Brooke.
Live greatly; so shalt thou acquire
Unknown capacities of joy.
– Coventry Patmore.
When the ladies reached their own room that night, Mildred began at once with something which was, evidently, uppermost in her mind.
“Aunt Janet, do you believe in special providences?”
“Do I not, dear! you know my life has been full of them.”
“Well, auntie, it seems absurd that every action of our lives should be interesting to Heaven, but I think I was sent to Granada as the great turning-point in my life.”
“Nothing very wonderful in that, if you believe that the hairs of our heads are all numbered, and that a sparrow does not fall to the ground without our Father’s knowledge. But what do you mean? Have you met your fate in the hero of Granada?”
“No, no! Nothing in the least romantic, but I have decided on my mission in life; you know I have been a long time on the look-out for it.”
“I always thought your mission, dear, was to make everyone the happier for having come in contact with you.”
“Ah, but you are an infatuated auntie, you know, and have always spoiled me, as papa did; but aren’t you anxious to know what I am going to be?”
“Something quixotic, Millie, to suit our surroundings. It is the couleur locale which has dazzled you; the romance of the Alhambra is too much for you. Is it a novelist or a poet? Don’t dear; the market is overstocked. Now, domestic service offers a grand field.”
“But I don’t feel it to be my vocation. I shall set to work to revolutionise the system of our great hospitals. I have seen enough to-day to convince me that, as at present constituted, they do as much harm as good.”
“Revolutionise the hospitals! Isn’t that rather ‘a large order?’”
“Weaker women than I have done greater things than this; and then remember, auntie dear, the lines —
‘And none are strong but who confess
With happy skill that they are weak.’
Besides, don’t you think the public is almost ready for a revolution on this question?”
“You know, Mildred, my opinion; but I never could see my way clear to any interference with hospitals. It is a terrible responsibility, don’t you think?”
“Poor papa has often declared to me that the public would one day wake up to the fact that the hospital was one of the great shams of the time.”
“I know, dear. But St. Bernard’s having made your papa’s fame and fortune, isn’t it rather a shame to upset the concern?”
“I have no desire to upset anything. Don’t you remember how we rebuilt our parish church at Welby, without stopping the services for a single day? That is what I want to do in this case.”
“I don’t quite follow you, dear.”
“Well, of course I haven’t formed any complete scheme yet; but I have often thought that what we want in London, for instance, is a sort of Hospital University, with a great number of affiliated colleges of healing. Not a great unwieldy Cathedral of Surgery as they call it, here and there, but a ‘Chapel of Ease’ at every sufferer’s door. Fifty beds should be the limit, I think.”
“Not enough. Don’t you know the examining bodies do not recognise as a teaching hospital one with less than two hundred beds?”
“But I am concerned with healing the sick, not with teaching students.”
“Just so; but where are your future doctors to come from if you cut off their only way of learning their business?”
“Do you really believe the present system is the only way of training medical men and medical women, for I recognise the right and advantage of women students?”
“Your papa has often told me that a doctor can only be liberally educated by being enabled to draw his conclusions from a great number of facts; and, as each case has some peculiar feature, the more cases he sees, even of the same disease, the more the intelligent pupil will learn.”
“I see the force of that,” replied Mildred, “but I think my scheme would meet it. I would make use of the great pauper infirmaries, at present entirely wasted, as schools of medicine.”
“I fear they would prove very imperfect substitutes for the great hospitals. I am told, and I can readily understand it to be the fact, that the cases which gravitate to the parish infirmary are usually chronic diseases, old-standing bronchitic, asthmatic, and rheumatic troubles, with bed cases innumerable; and all of little or no use to the student.”
“But wait, aunt; you have only heard of one side of my plan; it provides for a vast and efficient system of out-door treatment. I strongly object to rushing every troublesome phase of disease away from home, and placing it in a great hospital. My indoor scheme would only embrace such cases as could not wisely be treated in the family. What at present do you take to be the chief passport to a bed in a general hospital?”
“The malady which has the greatest interest for the doctor who has power to admit it.”
“Precisely. But, as it is not the doctors who support the hospitals, don’t you think the intentions of the subscribers are often defeated by this system? Is it not, in fact, getting money under false pretences to ask for funds to help sick folk, and then apply them to even so good a purpose as medical education?”
“I think you put it too strongly, Mildred. The public does understand that in supporting the hospital, they are training their doctors.”
“Then,” said Mildred, “the fraud is on the patients. Lady Ponsonby de Tompkyns gives a big cheque to the hospitals, that she may have confidence that no new remedies may first be used upon her. Like the lady of the Fly papers, who
‘Wouldn’t try ’em on her cat,
If she could try ’em on another.’
You see, the public is in this dilemma – either they are deceived as to the way patients are treated, or if not then the poor sufferers are misled to their grievous hurt.”
“I know of terrible things which Sister Agnes has told me,” said Aunt Janet; “and I am afraid more goes on than even she knows. Your father told me of a case of puerperal fever which was clearly one of licensed murder. He protested, but in vain. A poor woman recently confined was suffering from hyperpyrexia, which no drugs would abate. The physician in charge had become enamoured of the iced-water-bath treatment, and the wretched woman was the first victim at St. Bernard’s to the new fad. She was kept for four hours a day in the cold water at her bedside. When she died, her relatives all protested she was murdered.”
“That must have discredited the treatment rather.”
“Not at all; they persevered in ‘giving the thing a fair trial.’ The Germans invented it, and said it was very effectual in bringing down high temperatures. At St. Bernard’s, it brought the patients down, and the doctors could not bring them up again: and, as all the cases died, the authorities stopped the experiments; but some of the physicians declare to this day, I believe, that ‘there was something in it, after all.’ Mr. Crowe was very strongly in favour of it; he said it was physiologically right, and therefore must be so medically.”
“But perhaps the patients would all have died, any way,” said Mildred.
“Very likely; but what cruel torture in your last moments to be served like that!”
“Yes, that is the horrible part of the business. At an hospital, you cannot even die in peace; you are in danger of being the subject of some ghastly medical freak while there is a gasp left in you.”
“Yet, as the doctor must necessarily be an autocrat in his treatment, I don’t see how you can interfere with him,” mused Aunt Janet.
“Oh, can’t you! Do you think they would dare do such things in a parish infirmary? What a pretty storm there would be if our Mr. Hilbourne, for instance, heard of such things at St. Mark’s Workhouse! Don’t you think the doctors content themselves with using the best of their already acquired knowledge there?” asked Mildred.
“Yet, the poor think much more highly of hospital than of infirmary treatment.”
“Naturally. It is drummed into them a hundred times a day by everybody in the place, that everything is being done for their benefit. Papa told me of ‘a very pretty knee case’ which had been fourteen months in the wards, merely because it was an object of surgical interest, and was the subject of a monograph.”
“Your scheme, I fear, would not provide for monographs!”
“I fear you think I am very quixotic, aunt.”
“No, dear; you are not tilting at windmills, but at real dragons, which I am afraid are much too strong for you! But we must think it over. Dr. Graves is a good, sensible man, and though of course wrapped up in the conventionalism of his class is still open to reason. You will want more armour, and a sharper sword than Isabella’s for this fight, I am thinking.”
“Yet, I can see,” said the girl, “in my prophetic vision, our Boabdil giving me the key of the fortress, if we go to work properly. Meanwhile, let us build our Santa Fe.”
“Castles in Spain! dear – just the place for them. I can see ghosts of giant physiologists and vampire surgeons guarding the treasures of their vermilion towers, and warning you off their premises.”
“I don’t fear them, aunt. I shall visit Isabella’s tomb again for courage, though.”
“I think we had better sleep over this. Buenas noches, señorita.”
“Con dios.”
When the time came to leave Granada, Aunt Janet noticed that her niece was in rather low spirits. She guessed the cause, for it was manifest she was more than interested in the young doctor; and though it was difficult to say whether her interest was more in his work than in himself, or the contrary, she was glad that something had arisen to rouse the girl from the grief which had weighed upon her since her father’s death. That was the charm of Aunt Janet – she always accepted accomplished facts with equanimity, and perhaps was rather a fatalist. If Mildred was really in love, so much the better – she thought it would replace the lost light which had gone out of her life; and if, still better, she had really found a great philanthropic object in life, why the meeting with young Elsworth was the best thing that could have happened.
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough-hew them how we will.”
Would it not be strange if it should turn out that Elsworth’s exile to Granada, and their visit, should be the centre round which the lives of two noble souls should revolve?
