THE SCHOOL OF ANATOMY.
Foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from her mass
Of men....—_Browning._
Elsworth entered the profession of medicine with a large stock of a
commodity just now rather out of fashion with our young men. This limp
and degenerate age seems unable to supply our youth with backbone
enough to make them enthusiasts about anything beyond dress, the Opera
Comique, and the quality of their tobacco. They adopt a profession
without at all intending it shall absorb them; they consider it a sign
of weakness to show a consuming interest in great subjects, and their
energies are frittered away on the most trivial concerns. How many men
enter the Church, not as though Heaven-sent messengers, but as
affording them a pleasant way of getting on in life! As for a message
to mankind or a call from God, it would be too much in the way of the
Methodists and Salvation Army people to be consistent with their
notions of propriety. What they have to offer the world may be taken or
left without interfering in the least with their peace of mind. Hence
so many empty churches, while our courts and alleys are full of folk
perishing for lack of knowledge which nobody is sufficiently interested
to impart, except in a perfunctory manner. It may be all very well for
good Mr. Spurgeon to be consumed with desire to save souls; that sort
of thing may be consistent with life in the “region of the three D’s”
(Dirt, Dissent, and Dulness), over the water. But fancy anybody in Pall
Mall or the Row being “so dreadfully in earnest, don’t you know!”
Such being too commonly the case with the Church, what can be expected
of medicine? Inaugural addresses and the classic poets notwithstanding,
it is rather too much, they say, to expect fellows in the nineteenth
century to live up to an ideal guild of St. Luke. Now, by a beautiful
instance of the law of compensation ever active in Nature, just as men
are voting enthusiasm bad form, women are taking up the work men are
too limp and too selfish to perform, and the spectacle is presented to
the eye of hundreds of noble, clever, earnest, indefatigable women
coming forward to fill the places which men decline, and leaving work
more congenial to their habits and tastes, because men lack the energy
and sympathy required to effect the necessary reforms. The salt of the
earth is now fast becoming a feminine compound.
But the man of our story was a true man, not a nineteenth century
sham; he had his enthusiasms and was not ashamed of them, was a
sentimentalist if you will, and was proud of the title. He had an idea
that no good had ever been wrought in this world except by enthusiasts
and sentimentalists. He felt that sentiment was thought sublimed, and
enthusiasm the holy fire that exalted it; his prayer was to be classed
with the band of workers who had helped their world; and when he
decided to enter the portals of a great hospital, it was not to make
his account with fame, to exploit the poor and suffering for his own
advancement, but just simply to have the satisfaction day by day of
having, by even ever so little, diminished the awful sum of human
misery. It was a perfectly contemptible ideal, an absurdly insufficient
goal to nineteen-twentieths of the men who that day had enrolled their
names in the books of the hospitals of the kingdom; but it was just
simply _his_ ideal and _his_ goal, and he thought no other profession
would help him to attain these like medicine. “The parson,” he used to
say, “sees men at their best, the lawyer at their worst, but the doctor
as they are. I will be a doctor.” Now of all things which Elsworth was
not, least was he a prig; so that he had no idea of the very unusual
nature of the impetus that was driving him on a medical career. He
thought, in his ingenuous way, that such impulses moved his
fellow-aspirants. This sentiment was to be modified.
In what a world he found himself! He had several friends on the staff,
and some half-dozen of his fellow-students were more or less known to
him; but to what others was he introduced! In a couple of hundred young
men one looks for variety, one expects that some will be heedless,
vain, indolent, or vicious, while others are earnest, industrious, and
true. But who were these men he saw to-day, and how came they to adopt
the sacred ministry of healing, the work of the great Physician Himself?
Rough, rowdy, vulgar, and decidedly unintellectual as many of them
appeared, with all the characteristics of the fast man about town, the
profession they had chosen to follow seemed likely to suffer at their
hands, if these men were fair samples. It has long been the habit of
society to view with great leniency the peculiarly Bohemian manners and
customs of medical students. The very term has become the symbol for
rollicking rowdyism that would be tolerated in no other class. Their
boisterous mirth, rude violence, and disregard of the ordinary
proprieties of civilized existence have become recognised as their
appropriate conduct, partly no doubt because their lugubrious
occupation at the schools needs relaxation of a pronounced kind, and
especially perhaps that as they must when in actual practice become the
gravest and most “respectable” of men, it must be permitted to them to
compress into their student life the follies, the riotousness, and the
highly flavoured pleasures that must suffice for the rest of their
mundane existence.
Be this as it may, it is certain that from the patient in the hospital
ward to the magistrate on the bench, conduct that would be considered
in other men as intolerable and worthy of the severest punishment is in
their case lightly passed over. On the part of the public at large, and
on behalf of the men themselves, this is a great error, and has its
foundation in a wrong conception, both of the work the students have to
do and the sort of relaxation it requires. On behalf of the suffering
humanity soon to become dependant upon such men for their help in
sickness, a revolution in such a false system of education is no less
urgently demanded. Unpleasant as the work of the dissecting,
_post-mortem_ rooms, and hospital wards, may seem to the outside world,
its daily recurrence makes it so familiar to all engaged in it that it
very soon ceases to be any more unpleasant than many other occupations.
The men who take real interest in their work very speedily forget or do
not recognise any of its disagreeables, while those who do not acquire
this real interest in their occupation become mere hangers-on at the
schools, and grow rowdy for want of better employment. The _real_
students, with their hearts in business, do not seek or take such
methods of unbending the bow; for the rest it should not be permitted
them to insult their noble calling by behaviour that would disgrace
savages in unexplored tracts of equatorial Africa.
The sooner a more common-sense theory of medical student life is
adopted by the public, the better for the world and the men themselves.
Young Elsworth, then, was not altogether pleased with what he saw of
his future companions, and it took him but a short time after his entry
at the schools to see that not more than half of the men by whom he was
surrounded would be for him even tolerable class mates.
The opening festival was over, and early in the following week he began
the work of dissecting. He had previously bespoke of the College beadle
what is known as “a part,” for be it known to the outside world that a
well conditioned corpse having no friends to claim it after death in
the hospital or workhouse which saw its owner’s last moments, is by the
Anatomy Act permitted, under certain legal restrictions, to be used for
dissection. To preserve it for the length of time it will require for
some six or eight men daily working at it to unravel all its mysteries
of muscle, nerve, artery, and vital organs, its blood vessels are
injected by an ingenious process by the dissecting room porters with a
preservative fluid which, permeating every part of the body, keeps it
fairly fresh and arrests decay till the scalpel of the young anatomist
has revealed all it has to teach.
Let us enter into the dissecting room of St. Bernard’s, and see how our
future doctors learn to deal with the ailments our flesh is heir to. It
is a spacious chamber, some fifty feet long by thirty feet wide; its
floor is slate, cold, and non-absorbent; its walls half-way up of the
same impervious material; it has no windows, but is lighted by a glass
roof and many gas jets for dark days. On either side are eight strong
tables, on each of which lies a corpse. Round each table are several
heavy, well-made stools; they need be heavy. They are often subject to
rough usage at the hands of their occupants when not engaged in more
scientific work.
On this first of October, all the “subjects,” as they are technically
called, are untouched by the knife; in a few days they will scarcely be
recognisable as having ever been our brothers and sisters of the mortal
life. The busy scalpel of the anatomy student will be engaged on every
limb and feature in “getting out,” as it is termed, his “part.” Then
the observant eye of a man of science would see how fearfully and
wonderfully we are made. The Psalmist could have had but a faint idea
how much his beautiful phrase conveyed. Here are displayed for us the
exquisite sets of muscles and tendons that enable us to move our hands
and arms. This part shows the nerve and blood supply of the leg, and
that one the machinery by which we smile, laugh, or express our wonder
and surprise. Here is a man at work seeking to unfold the marvellous
convolutions of the brain, while at another table one has got down to
the articulations of the foot, and is showing the pulleys and joints
that enable us to walk. The art of anatomical dissection consists in
freeing the muscles, tendons, arteries, veins, and nerves from the
surrounding fat and connective tissue which in the living body
preserves and covers them.
It is absolutely necessary that the student should not only know from
books, but actually see with his own eyes, and for a long period
attentively observe the origin and course of every nerve, artery, and
vein which in the whole body is capable of being dissected out. He must
know the exact position of all the muscles, how they move the bones,
how they extend or flex the limbs, what nerves supply them with motive
power, and how that nerve takes its course from the brain or spinal
cord. The number of complications is so great that nothing but patient
tracing out with forceps and scalpel for himself will ever teach a man
anatomy.
As an accurate knowledge of this science is the foundation of all
medical learning, it is not to be wondered at that the medical schools
and examining bodies insist on a very long and careful training in the
practical part of this study. So indispensable is it that the schools
have never scrupled to obtain subjects for dissection when popular
prejudice stinted the supply, by foul means when fair did not avail. No
questions were asked in the old days, before the passing of the Anatomy
Act, how the “subject” was procured; enough that it was on the table
for the uses of science. Whether murder had brought it there, or the
visitation of the graveyard by the body-snatcher, nobody concerned in
teaching or learning anatomy cared a jot.
In one famous school there was a private trap through which the corpse
was pushed into the porter’s room, he passing the money out to the
persons who delivered the body, and holding no communication with the
body-snatcher, or even seeing his face. Things, however, are different
now, and the workhouses are permitted to send the bodies of friendless
and unclaimed paupers, whom nobody owns or cares to bury, for the
purposes of dissection.
Dissection and the making of a post-mortem examination, though often
confounded in the public mind, differ materially. Dissection consists
in minutely tracing out all the important structures of the limbs,
body, and vital organs, and thus it takes several weeks’ hard work to
get through a whole subject; while a post-mortem examination is the
labour of an hour or two, and consists in examining and noting the
pathological conditions of the internal organs, with a view merely to
discovering the cause of death. An adult subject is worth about £5 when
properly prepared for research. Each arm and leg, the half of the head,
the chest, and the rest of the trunk, was charged to the student
requiring it at St. Bernard’s, 12_s._ 6_d._, and he was expected to
make good use of his opportunity. Every portion removed by his scalpel
was carefully gathered up by a porter, and every night and morning
placed in a coffin in the vaults below. When a coffin is filled with
this minutely divided humanity, it is sent to a cemetery and buried as
“our brethren and sisters departed.” The provisions of the Anatomy Act
forbid the taking of any portion of the subjects out of the schools;
nevertheless more than one ardent student whom we see in the room will
finish his work on the hand or the foot at his own lodgings, to the
horror and disgust of his landlady if she catches him at it.
Some men never make good dissectors; they can cram up what they want
for their examinations without the infinite pains required for a
beautiful “preparation” such as is being made at this table on our
right for the college museum. It is an arm, and every muscle stands out
clean and clear, every artery is seen with its vermilion wax injection
running its sharply defined course, and anastomosing with its
neighbouring vessels. Here are the nerves like silver threads,
becoming, like the blood supply, smaller as they reach the fingers,
till they are lost in their terminations at the tips. It requires a man
with a special genius, and the gift of an infinite capacity for taking
pains, to do work like this, and many take a pride in doing it.
Round this table on the left is a group of junior students, listening
to the demonstrator, who is lecturing on the muscles of the chest, or
thorax as it is called, and asking each of his auditors in turn some
question to test his knowledge, and explain his difficulties if he have
any.
The coloured diagrams round the walls, and the illustrations in the
text-books used, serve to complete our acquaintance with the matter in
hand, and its daily repetition fixes it in the memory. The men do their
work in great linen blouses or aprons with sleeves. Most of them smoke,
and the dissecting-room certainly is one place from which the most
violent anti-tobacco agitator would hardly wish to banish it, if he
knew how it mitigates its awful odours. When the morning is over, and
the men have taken their lunch (they eat sandwiches at their work
without the least fastidiousness), few of them return for any more work
in that place unless they chance to be very industrious. There are some
few men who, in their first and second year, dissect on every available
opportunity; for anatomy cannot be crammed, and can only be mastered by
this persistent business of the scalpel. Occasionally a visitor will
drop in to look round at the work going on; some general practitioner
who has been at the school in his early days, to refresh his memory on
some point, or to rekindle for a few moments the lost enthusiasm in
such studies. Often they tell good stories of the difficulties they had
in the olden time of procuring bodies. One old fellow who had been a
demonstrator in that room, told one day how, on one occasion some fifty
years before, he had been urging the beadle to provide more subjects.
“Can’t get you a fresh ’un before this day week, sir,” replied the man.
“You see, sir, it is my mother-in-law. She only died last night. She
will be buried on Thursday. We’ll have her up the same night, and
she’ll be ready next morning for you.”
And then he related how the body-snatchers went to Bow Cemetery, then
almost out in the country, and “resurrected” the poor woman, stripped
her of her shroud (to take which was felony), put her in a light cart,
and drove off with her. On either side of the Bow road at that time
were fields; it was very dark and lonely. When half-way towards their
destination they feared they were closely pursued, and to avoid a
capture they cast the body out into the ditch, and made off with all
haste. Next morning there was a report of a horrible murder. An inquest
followed, and an open verdict was returned, name and cause of death
unknown.
Close by the hospital there dwelt an aged man with his daughter in
genteel poverty, a learned and serious person, who seemed to have known
better days. His conversation was charming, and his society was much
sought after, but seldom accorded. He kept himself apart from his
neighbours, and held no more intercourse with them than was necessary
for the amenities of life. But he was on good terms with the St.
Bernard’s staff, often strolled through the dissecting-room and the
museum, and was generally present in the operating theatre when
anything of special interest was “on the table.”
There was considerable mystery about this man, Dr. Robert Day by name;
but the hospital people knew his antecedents, and thought much the more
of him on account of them. Indeed, most medical folk considered him a
hero and a martyr of science, though nobody took the least trouble to
help him in any more substantial way. Many years ago Dr. Robert Day had
been professor of anatomy at a great school of medicine. He was an
author of celebrity, and his works were text books in the hands of all
the students. He had been implicated in the Burke and Hare scandal, had
been proved to have availed himself of the services of these murderers
to procure him subjects for dissection at his school of anatomy. The
murderers having been detected in their horrible business, and having
met their fate, the attention of the populace was forcibly directed to
Dr. Robert Day and his dealings with the criminals. Had he been caught
when the attack was made on his residence, he would have speedily been
lynched. As it was, his house was wrecked, his furniture destroyed, his
costly library set on fire, and he had to fly the town to escape
personal violence. He was long in hiding, a ruined man, subsisting as a
medical coach under an assumed name, till after some years, when the
storm had passed over, and the new Anatomy Act had set the popular mind
at rest, he was able to declare himself amongst his professional
brethren, but they were always shy of him, and, though in private they
let him see they thought none the worse of him for his complicity in
“subject” getting, it was impossible to put him forward, or do him any
very material service. They could not be hard on him. They had all
profited by his research; all had learned their anatomy more or less
from his books. It was little to them how he came by his knowledge. His
more fortunate brethren in the kindred sciences now do not scruple to
use methods to obtain their objects which, if fully laid bare to the
inspection of the lay and ignorant public, would perhaps be considered
only slightly less objectionable. But then the lay public is so
unreasonable. They demand to be cured instantly of all the ailments
that afflict them, and object to give up their mothers, their children,
or their friends, and indeed even their cats and dogs, on whose living
bodies the necessary experiments can be duly tried. This is naturally
irritating to the scientific mind; it feels it is expected to make
bricks without straw; and the straw, in the shape of clinical and
physiological material, must be had somehow, so they protest.