The examination Philip had passed before he was articled to a chartered
accountant was sufficient qualification for him to enter a medical
school. He chose St. Luke’s because his father had been a student
there, and before the end of the summer session had gone up to London
for a day in order to see the secretary. He got a list of rooms from
him, and took lodgings in a dingy house which had the advantage of
being within two minutes’ walk of the hospital.
“You’ll have to arrange about a part to dissect,” the secretary told
him. “You’d better start on a leg; they generally do; they seem to
think it easier.”
Philip found that his first lecture was in anatomy, at eleven, and
about half past ten he limped across the road, and a little nervously
made his way to the Medical School. Just inside the door a number of
notices were pinned up, lists of lectures, football fixtures, and the
like; and these he looked at idly, trying to seem at his ease. Young
men and boys dribbled in and looked for letters in the rack, chatted
with one another, and passed downstairs to the basement, in which was
the student’s reading-room. Philip saw several fellows with a
desultory, timid look dawdling around, and surmised that, like himself,
they were there for the first time. When he had exhausted the notices
he saw a glass door which led into what was apparently a museum, and
having still twenty minutes to spare he walked in. It was a collection
of pathological specimens. Presently a boy of about eighteen came up to
him.
“I say, are you first year?” he said.
“Yes,” answered Philip.
“Where’s the lecture room, d’you know? It’s getting on for eleven.”
“We’d better try to find it.”
They walked out of the museum into a long, dark corridor, with the
walls painted in two shades of red, and other youths walking along
suggested the way to them. They came to a door marked Anatomy Theatre.
Philip found that there were a good many people already there. The
seats were arranged in tiers, and just as Philip entered an attendant
came in, put a glass of water on the table in the well of the
lecture-room and then brought in a pelvis and two thigh-bones, right
and left. More men entered and took their seats and by eleven the
theatre was fairly full. There were about sixty students. For the most
part they were a good deal younger than Philip, smooth-faced boys of
eighteen, but there were a few who were older than he: he noticed one
tall man, with a fierce red moustache, who might have been thirty;
another little fellow with black hair, only a year or two younger; and
there was one man with spectacles and a beard which was quite gray.
The lecturer came in, Mr. Cameron, a handsome man with white hair and
clean-cut features. He called out the long list of names. Then he made
a little speech. He spoke in a pleasant voice, with well-chosen words,
and he seemed to take a discreet pleasure in their careful arrangement.
He suggested one or two books which they might buy and advised the
purchase of a skeleton. He spoke of anatomy with enthusiasm: it was
essential to the study of surgery; a knowledge of it added to the
appreciation of art. Philip pricked up his ears. He heard later that
Mr. Cameron lectured also to the students at the Royal Academy. He had
lived many years in Japan, with a post at the University of Tokyo, and
he flattered himself on his appreciation of the beautiful.
“You will have to learn many tedious things,” he finished, with an
indulgent smile, “which you will forget the moment you have passed your
final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost
than never to have learned at all.”
He took up the pelvis which was lying on the table and began to
describe it. He spoke well and clearly.
At the end of the lecture the boy who had spoken to Philip in the
pathological museum and sat next to him in the theatre suggested that
they should go to the dissecting-room. Philip and he walked along the
corridor again, and an attendant told them where it was. As soon as
they entered Philip understood what the acrid smell was which he had
noticed in the passage. He lit a pipe. The attendant gave a short
laugh.
“You’ll soon get used to the smell. I don’t notice it myself.”
He asked Philip’s name and looked at a list on the board.
“You’ve got a leg—number four.”
Philip saw that another name was bracketed with his own.
“What’s the meaning of that?” he asked.
“We’re very short of bodies just now. We’ve had to put two on each
part.”
The dissecting-room was a large apartment painted like the corridors,
the upper part a rich salmon and the dado a dark terra-cotta. At
regular intervals down the long sides of the room, at right angles with
the wall, were iron slabs, grooved like meat-dishes; and on each lay a
body. Most of them were men. They were very dark from the preservative
in which they had been kept, and the skin had almost the look of
leather. They were extremely emaciated. The attendant took Philip up to
one of the slabs. A youth was standing by it.
“Is your name Carey?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh, then we’ve got this leg together. It’s lucky it’s a man, isn’t
it?”
“Why?” asked Philip.
“They generally always like a male better,” said the attendant. “A
female’s liable to have a lot of fat about her.”
Philip looked at the body. The arms and legs were so thin that there
was no shape in them, and the ribs stood out so that the skin over them
was tense. A man of about forty-five with a thin, gray beard, and on
his skull scanty, colourless hair: the eyes were closed and the lower
jaw sunken. Philip could not feel that this had ever been a man, and
yet in the row of them there was something terrible and ghastly.
“I thought I’d start at two,” said the young man who was dissecting
with Philip.
“All right, I’ll be here then.”
He had bought the day before the case of instruments which was needful,
and now he was given a locker. He looked at the boy who had accompanied
him into the dissecting-room and saw that he was white.
“Make you feel rotten?” Philip asked him.
“I’ve never seen anyone dead before.”
They walked along the corridor till they came to the entrance of the
school. Philip remembered Fanny Price. She was the first dead person he
had ever seen, and he remembered how strangely it had affected him.
There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they
did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think
that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and
laughed. There was something horrible about the dead, and you could
imagine that they might cast an evil influence on the living.
“What d’you say to having something to eat?” said his new friend to
Philip.
They went down into the basement, where there was a dark room fitted up
as a restaurant, and here the students were able to get the same sort
of fare as they might have at an aerated bread shop. While they ate
(Philip had a scone and butter and a cup of chocolate), he discovered
that his companion was called Dunsford. He was a fresh-complexioned
lad, with pleasant blue eyes and curly, dark hair, large-limbed, slow
of speech and movement. He had just come from Clifton.
“Are you taking the Conjoint?” he asked Philip.
“Yes, I want to get qualified as soon as I can.”
“I’m taking it too, but I shall take the F. R. C. S. afterwards. I’m
going in for surgery.”
Most of the students took the curriculum of the Conjoint Board of the
College of Surgeons and the College of Physicians; but the more
ambitious or the more industrious added to this the longer studies
which led to a degree from the University of London. When Philip went
to St. Luke’s changes had recently been made in the regulations, and
the course took five years instead of four as it had done for those who
registered before the autumn of 1892. Dunsford was well up in his plans
and told Philip the usual course of events. The “first conjoint”
examination consisted of biology, anatomy, and chemistry; but it could
be taken in sections, and most fellows took their biology three months
after entering the school. This science had been recently added to the
list of subjects upon which the student was obliged to inform himself,
but the amount of knowledge required was very small.
When Philip went back to the dissecting-room, he was a few minutes
late, since he had forgotten to buy the loose sleeves which they wore
to protect their shirts, and he found a number of men already working.
His partner had started on the minute and was busy dissecting out
cutaneous nerves. Two others were engaged on the second leg, and more
were occupied with the arms.
“You don’t mind my having started?”
“That’s all right, fire away,” said Philip.
He took the book, open at a diagram of the dissected part, and looked
at what they had to find.
“You’re rather a dab at this,” said Philip.
“Oh, I’ve done a good deal of dissecting before, animals, you know, for
the Pre Sci.”
There was a certain amount of conversation over the dissecting-table,
partly about the work, partly about the prospects of the football
season, the demonstrators, and the lectures. Philip felt himself a
great deal older than the others. They were raw schoolboys. But age is
a matter of knowledge rather than of years; and Newson, the active
young man who was dissecting with him, was very much at home with his
subject. He was perhaps not sorry to show off, and he explained very
fully to Philip what he was about. Philip, notwithstanding his hidden
stores of wisdom, listened meekly. Then Philip took up the scalpel and
the tweezers and began working while the other looked on.
“Ripping to have him so thin,” said Newson, wiping his hands. “The
blighter can’t have had anything to eat for a month.”
“I wonder what he died of,” murmured Philip.
“Oh, I don’t know, any old thing, starvation chiefly, I suppose…. I
say, look out, don’t cut that artery.”
“It’s all very fine to say, don’t cut that artery,” remarked one of the
men working on the opposite leg. “Silly old fool’s got an artery in the
wrong place.”
“Arteries always are in the wrong place,” said Newson. “The normal’s
the one thing you practically never get. That’s why it’s called the
normal.”
“Don’t say things like that,” said Philip, “or I shall cut myself.”
“If you cut yourself,” answered Newson, full of information, “wash it
at once with antiseptic. It’s the one thing you’ve got to be careful
about. There was a chap here last year who gave himself only a prick,
and he didn’t bother about it, and he got septicaemia.”
“Did he get all right?”
“Oh, no, he died in a week. I went and had a look at him in the P. M.
room.”
Philip’s back ached by the time it was proper to have tea, and his
luncheon had been so light that he was quite ready for it. His hands
smelt of that peculiar odour which he had first noticed that morning in
the corridor. He thought his muffin tasted of it too.
“Oh, you’ll get used to that,” said Newson. “When you don’t have the
good old dissecting-room stink about, you feel quite lonely.”
“I’m not going to let it spoil my appetite,” said Philip, as he
followed up the muffin with a piece of cake.