HIS ’PRENTICE HAND.
Knowledge after all, is not the greatest thing in life; it is not
the “be-all and the end-all” here. Life is not science. The moral
nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual
nature. Goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice are worth
all the talents in the world.—_G. H. Lewes._
The comfort or the misery of many families may probably hang upon
the notions that each of you will carry from this place.—_Sir
Thomas Watson._
But Lindsay Street was not wholly inhabited by the idlers. There were
many men who led solitary lives at their lodgings, and worked night and
day at books or bed side. Some took portions of their subjects home to
dissect, and the back gardens at their lodgings were often used as
places of sepulture for brains, hands, or as Tom Hood sings,—
“Those little feet that used to look so pretty.
There’s one I know in Bunhill Row, the other’s in the City.”
Maternity cases were attended by the junior students at the homes of
the patients within a radius of two miles of the hospital. This served
to bring them into direct contact with the poor, and familiarized them
with scenes of the most horrible destitution in the filthiest and
lowest slums of the metropolis. The young men were usually favourites
with the people, who are always taken with the free and easy, the
good-humoured and generous behaviour of medical students, anxious to
improve their own knowledge of work which will be of the greatest
importance to them in their future career, and glad to render
their—sometimes very far from skilled—services to uncomplaining
poverty, with a view to getting their papers signed for the colleges,
which demand a definite amount of this work to be performed while in
connection with their medical school. It was hourly enforced upon them
that such was their only chance of the free and unrestricted use of
human “material” for acquiring this sort of information. Their
blunders, their negligences, would not count against them whilst in a
state of pupilage. A great city, a poverty-stricken population, a
benevolent public, and the custom of their profession, had placed at
their disposal an immense amount of raw material, unbounded facilities
for picking up knowledge, and the deft use of mysterious and
complicated instruments. This skill, this dexterous use of the tools of
their art, would shortly enable them to earn a handsome living. Let,
then, every moment be devoted to obtaining that knowledge at the cost
of ignorant and uncomplaining patients who would only see in their
attentions the desire of a charitable young gentleman to help them,
just as the visiting lady and the clergyman helped them efficiently.
Let, then, every day and every case enable them to use more skilfully,
under such clinical conditions, those tools the awkward use of which
would inevitably be detected in the higher walks of their art to which
they are progressing. Such is the admirable way in which the highest
skill and wisdom of medicine is combined with the attempts of the
novices to attain it in the practice of the hospitals, that the
shortcomings and feeble efforts of the learners are glorified and
ennobled by the brilliant successes of the teachers, till the mistakes
are lost sight of in the dazzling triumphs of their achievements. It is
like the Catholic doctrine of works of supererogation. St. Francis
Xavier was so much better than he had any occasion to be, that he had a
fund of merit at his disposal for helping the deficiencies of those who
fell short in their good works.
A great surgeon achieves a brilliant success in an operation which
sends a man away from the wards to his own home restored in health and
limbs to his family and his work. It is the hospital which gets the
credit, and the credit is sufficient to atone for many of the maimings
and other unfortunate terminations of a score of cases, which are
looked upon as failures, not of much greater consequence than Beau
Brummel’s cravats cast aside on his dressing-table. It will not do to
be too hard on the failures. Even Professor Holloway did not publish
_them_. The advertisements of quack and royal surgeon are alike in this
respect at least, that they do not go into any such unnecessary details!
But oh, the spoiled cravats! condemned to drag out a wretched existence
because they had the misfortune to be not only ignorant, and poor, and
powerless, but waste material used by St. Bernard’s in the attempt to
make of any person able to pay its fees a competent healer of diseases.
Not enough was it that they were born into a hard and cruel world,
heavily handicapped by feeble frames and badly developed brains,
without education or any of the means of lifting themselves from the
slough of their environments, but it was also required of them by our
advanced civilization that they should yield up their poor bodies,
which were enough like better people’s frames for the purpose, to
become “teaching stuff” for classes at a medical school.
It was in Lindsay Street, and with Mrs. Jemima White, that Elsworth
went to lodge. He had abundant strength of mind, and it was little to
him that his fellow-boarders were a rather noisy set. He had full
control of himself, and did not permit them to influence him unduly in
the matter of sprees. He settled down steadily to his work, and did not
find his friends interfere with him much when they saw his tastes were
not quite their own; on the contrary, they rather respected him for his
diligence, in which there was not the least element of the prig. As for
his religion,—for Elsworth came to St. Bernard’s deeply imbued with
the religious spirit,—they smiled at him when he talked of it, which
was but seldom, as who should say, “Poor innocent! you will outgrow all
that quickly here, and find faith and the scalpel, dogma and the
microscope, go ill together!”
Yet they knew very well that several of their best men were earnest,
faithful Christian souls, who found high scholarship and the deepest
devotion to their profession accord extremely well with the doctrines
they professed. Still, the prevailing tone of the place, of students
and of teachers alike, was not in accord with religious feeling. The
school atmosphere was prejudicial to the cultivation of the Christian
sentiment; and whatever godliness was taken in by the first-year’s man
had usually left him long before he left St. Bernard’s; for there was a
new goddess, whose culture was daily in the ascendant, and St.
Bernard’s was one of her sacred places. Here she was wont to be
honoured, and the supreme God in the newer worship was forgotten. Her
glory so far outshone His that the men never named Him, except in their
expletives, nor was He in any of their thoughts. It was not held so
much an error to believe in the God of the Bible and the Creator and
Sustainer of the world, as an amiable weakness, a mark of defective
education, a lay feebleness of mind, excellent in subscribers to and
governors of hospitals, good also for patients as helping to teach them
submission, not bad at all for sisters and nurses for a similar reason;
but for medical men, the true high priests of science, utterly
inconsistent with their training and their mental attitude, which was
the demand for—facts! ever facts! and still more facts! Christianity
in a medical man meant an imperfect medical man; one who had been
arrested in his development,—a sort of _spina bifida_ case, or a
microcephalic idiot; want of lime in the bones, defective iron and
phosphorus; excellent condition for a subscriber, wofully defective in
a user. For it was discovered that the completely developed, the men
full of lime, iron, and phosphorus, the men of robust intellect and of
the full standard, did not, as a rule, subscribe anything to anything,
least of all to hospitals. Hospital contributors all went to church,
and read their Bibles, and then wrote cheques Q.E.D.; whereas they, the
persons for whose benefit chiefly all these cheques were signed, did
neither, because they were above such weaknesses, as became Fellows of
Royal Colleges and Bachelors of Science.
It required, therefore, no small amount of courage for a St. Bernard’s
man to profess Christianity there. He might don a philosophical
religion of Humanity, profess an eclectic faith compounded of Buddhism
and George Eliot, with a dash at Renan, because downright Bradlaugh and
Besantism was vulgar and slightly fusty; but he must denounce
priestcraft and other worldism, as became all true followers of
medicine, and emancipated souls baptized into the spirit of the age.
Elsworth took lodgings in Lindsay Street, just opposite Mrs. Harper’s
house. He soon became attached to little Murphy for his genial
disposition and cheerful heart, and it was not long before he found
some attraction in the lively company surrounding him. His own landlady
was serious and prim, and rigorously excluded the fast set of men at
the hospital. “What suited Mrs. Harper wouldn’t suit her,” she used to
say; “and if medical students couldn’t behave themselves like other
folk, she wouldn’t have anything to do with ’em.” So it was only quiet
men who went to live at Mrs. White’s—men who kept good hours, and
didn’t kick up rows in their rooms; “she wouldn’t have it at no price.”
She went to the little Baptist chapel in Bethesda Court, hard by, and
was a good, worthy woman, who made all about her the better for the
faith she professed; and though her grammar was defective, and her
notions crude, her religion made, as Rowland Hill remarked, “even her
cat the better for it,” for her feline companion never drank her
lodgers’ brandy, nor smoked their cigars, “nor took aught that wasn’t
his’n.” She kept her rooms, as became a good Baptist, beautifully
clean; and a man who wanted to read hard, and be quiet at his work,
found it a privilege to be cared for by Mrs. White. Here, when not at
the schools, Elsworth was almost always to be found; and human bones
were scattered grimly about the room. A valuable microscope, with a
large cabinet of preparations and sections, and a well-stocked bookcase
of works of anatomy and physiology, gave the sitting-room a learned
aspect, which of itself seemed to repress the rising desire of any
young visitor to invite the occupant to “a shindy.”