JACK MURPHY’S PARTY.
Wine and youth are fire upon fire.—_Fielding._
Idleness, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes.—_Burton._
Firmly screwed upon the door
Doth the lion-knocker frown.
To-night its reign of noise is o’er;
Courage, boys, we’ll have it down!
Long its strength defied
Every dodge we tried;
But its nuts no more shall bear it,
From the hinge to-night we’ll tear it.
—_Cruikshank’s Almanack._
Jack Murphy gave his party. The winter session was nearly over, and in
a few days the students would be all dispersed to the bosoms of their
families. For several days past their spirits had been rising, and
their fun even at lecture and in the wards was scarcely restrained
within moderate bounds. Work was kept up with difficulty, and many of
the men were leaving daily. Eight of the choicest spirits of the school
turned up on the appointed night. There was not one of them who had not
borne the brunt of battle, and won his spurs on a contested field.
There was big, heavy Tom Lennard. He was the hero of the smash-up at
the Chelsea Alcazar, a not very reputable, but much patronized, place
of entertainment, with an open-air dancing platform. There was a _fête_
one summer night there, and an attack on the place was organized by the
young medicos of the hospital. The police knew nothing of the proposed
attempt, and their numbers were too few to interfere much with their
destructive sport. After satisfying their vengeance for some affront
they had previously suffered at the hands of the proprietors, they
marched through the town in the small hours of the morning, shouting,
bellowing, and singing at the top of their alcoholized voices, and
upsetting everybody and everything that came in their way. At the
houses on either side of their path they threw stones, half bricks, and
other missiles, to the terror and alarm of the peaceful inhabitants,
and the danger of any sick person who might be in them. A large
brickbat, hurled by the powerful hand of Tom Lennard, fell plump on the
bed of an old gentleman who lay dying, and his friends were naturally
very angry with the perpetrators of such dastardly violence. The
destroying army of young gentlemen roughs passed on, leaving behind
them very distinct traces of the wreck they had wrought. There were
loud outcries against the police, and the whole business made a great
stir in the press. Somehow, Tom Lennard’s conduct was discovered by the
authorities of his hospital; he was then at St. Luke’s, but was
expelled with the loss of all his fees. It was felt that he had
somewhat exceeded the natural hilarity of an embryo surgeon, and he was
advised to migrate. He migrated to St. Bernard’s, where he had reason
to hope the tone of the governing body was less severe. This exploit,
and the fact that he was at least a confessor, if not a martyr, in the
cause of student life, made him immensely popular with his fellows, and
he was always in request when anything was “on.” Tom was a splendid
specimen of the muscular student, if student it were correct to term
him. He was never known to study anything, _con amore_, but practical
jokes, billiards, football, and midnight revelry. He did fairly well at
the examinations by coaches and hard cramming. He was magnificent at
“tips” for remembering needful points. All the nerves, arteries, origin
and insertion of muscles; infectious diseases, their symptoms and
treatment; everything medical and surgical that any examiner had been
ever known to ask a question about was by this ingenious fellow reduced
to a simple formula of catch words, constituting an original system of
artificial memory. Everybody who wanted a good tip for anatomical or
other difficulties went to Lennard, and came away with a cabalistic
arrangement of ludicrous words, that to most men were more difficult to
remember than the facts they were intended to represent. To himself,
however, they must have been amazingly useful, as he certainly did pass
his exams, and it is no less certain that he seldom did any work, and
never really understood what he did manage to get through. He was full
of good nature, and always ready to “help any lame dog over a stile,”
as he called it; so the needy men went to him when they wanted to
borrow; and the helpless idiots who could not learn in the ordinary
way, but resorted to royal roads and short cuts, got his tips, and made
so mixed and bungling a use of them, that this patent method frequently
completed the downfall of those who essayed to bend Ulysses’ bow.
There was Tim Finnigan, “a broth of a bhoy,” from the wilds of Galway,
all fun and frolic, but good at learning, and witty as ever trod a bog
or broke a head. It was he who led the raid on the Statuary Exhibition
near Queen’s College one Saturday night, and carried the great nude
gods and goddesses into the adjoining churchyard; so that when the good
folk went to early mass, they were confronted by Venuses and Apollos,
impudently airing themselves under the trees by the pathway, “mit
nodings on.” The maiden lady, whose parlour window overlooked the
churchyard, was horrified when she came down to breakfast that Sunday
morning, to see a dreadful great plaster man unblushingly staring at
her in the undraped similitude of a Greek athlete. The church was
served by an order of French religious, and the agony of the poor
fathers at the shocking display, rivalling the groves of Blarney,
outside their monastic church was painful to behold. Tim Finnigan was
present when they discovered the exhibition on their premises, and he
declared he never afterwards could believe that a Frenchman had any
sense of humour. Poor Tim was discovered to have been the hero of this
freak, and that was why he left Queen’s College and turned up at St.
Bernard’s. The maiden lady who had caught the vision of the athlete
thought expulsion a punishment all too light for him.
There was “Darkey” Dobbs; he was not christened Darkey, his swarthy
complexion was the cause of his nickname. He had great mechanical
ability, which he brought to bear on his practical jokes. His rapid
knack of getting brass plates off doors and railings, his skill at
wrenching knockers and bell-handles without alarming the owners, made
him an indispensable companion of a night’s fun. It was Darkey who
invented the celebrated coffee-stall joke. Four fellows hired a
“growler” early one winter’s morning in the main road by the hospital.
Three of them got out of the cab and called for coffee, and treated
cabby; and while the attention of the stall-keeper was arrested in
serving his new customers, the fourth occupant of the vehicle quietly
got out, and, unperceived by anybody, tied a long cord to one of the
posts of the stall and connected it with the shafts. Cabby remounted,
his fares discharged him and decamped, and he drove off dragging the
stall behind the vehicle, upsetting all the cups and platters, and
wrecking the whole concern. It was said that the stall-keeper’s
language was “not of a kind to adorn any Sunday-school book;” when the
rope was cut, and the damage calculated, he found to his great grief
that a pound would not cover it. It was a good deal for the poor fellow
to lose, but the amusement to the perpetrators of the joke was immense,
and “the greatest good of the greatest number” was one of the articles
of a creed they firmly held.
Then there was “Camel” Campbell, called “Camel” on account of his humpy
shoulders, though he was christened Horace. He was the hero of a droll
adventure in Great Titchfield Street. Passing through that thoroughfare
early one Sunday morning with four or five stalwart fellows of the same
kidney, they found a groggy old gentleman who could not gain admittance
to his house because his wife had bolted the door, and his latch-key
did not avail him. What did Camel and his mates do but in a moment pick
him up, and, swinging him backwards and forwards two or three times to
get a good impetus, shoot him feet foremost like a bolt from a
catapult, smash through the parlour window, where he landed on the
table amidst the crash of broken glass, and the disintegrated bust of
Psyche that erstwhile beamed upon the street from under a handsome
shade. Not one of them was caught; they dispersed by different routes,
and got clear away before the leaden feet of the policeman had brought
him on the scene.
It must not for a moment be supposed that all, or even the majority, of
the men were as much devoted to boisterous amusements as those we have
been describing. The quiet, hard workers found means to keep themselves
aloof from such revelling, though even they, under the charm of
the influence the leading spirits exercised over the generous,
light-hearted youths who compose the majority of medical students,
sometimes abandoned themselves to the spirit of devilry which often
broke loose when the day’s work was over.
Very hard workers, who went in for the greater prizes and scholarships,
were obliged to live at a distance from the place, that they might be
under the less temptation to this sort of thing.
The assembled guests were in high spirits to-night. Though they had
done very little of the work they were supposed to have got through,
and had attended scarcely half of the lectures they ought to have
heard, they had succeeded in getting their papers signed; and, with
but two exceptions, they had as much credit given them on their
schedules for honest work as if they had been the most assiduous and
conscientious of students. So they sang their songs and retold their
stories, drank their beer, smoked their tobacco, played nap, and
laughed and talked as only youngsters full of life and spirits can who
lead the Bohemian life of a medico.
Lennard was inclined to be sentimental and romantic. “What adventures,”
said he, “we should hear if the corpses in that dissecting-room over
yonder could tell their histories! Unclaimed all of them! Think what
that means. How low one must sink when nobody comes forward to ask the
parish to bury you at its own expense! Let me conjure up a history for
you of the seven subjects on the tables where we have been at work
to-day. I will begin at my own, where I am ‘doing my leg.’”
“Ah! I am glad you said ‘doing.’ I should have demurred to
‘dissecting,’ had you said that,” threw in Murphy.
Disregarding the interruption, Lennard went on: “This old man—not so
very old, about sixty I should say—has good features and toil-worn
hands; was, let us say, an unfrocked parson: fell into bad ways, family
disowned him; left his old associates, or they left him; gradually sank
lower and lower; sold little things in the street; lived at threepenny
lodging-houses; got ill; taken into the parish infirmary; died, and
came here. Think of all he must have gone through! How he would
remember his happy youth at school, at Oxford, his ordination, his good
aspirations, the society he mixed in, and the remorse that embittered
his life. This sort of thing is common enough. That woman on the next
table, with the spinal fracture, a tight-rope dancer in her early days;
used to delight the habitués of Old Vauxhall; one night fell and broke
her back. Folk soon got tired of helping her. Her husband made her
happy, and was good to her; till, in old age, he died, and she was left
bedridden and without means. Even the church folk got tired of the
case. She went into the workhouse, died, and so came here. All this as
likely as not. Think of those long years of suffering! From the last
dazzling lights and gaiety of Vauxhall, to the gradually beworsening
room where she lay a cripple for so many years, while her husband did
his best to cheer her, and make her as easy as he could. Behind her is
a coloured woman not more than forty. How came she here? A stranger
from beyond the seas, knowing nothing of our language, brought here by
friends who held out hopes of gain and pleasure, and then left her sick
and dying in St. George’s Workhouse, down by the London Docks.”
“Oh! hang it all, Lennard!” cried Mahoney; “you are preaching like a
teetotal orator. Confound it, we can’t stand the whole seven of ’em.
That’s enough! Why, what could the old parson want more than to give a
medical school like ours his ‘body of divinity’? He has preached a
better sermon in the hands of Professor Sturge than he ever did at
church, and his illustrations are much more telling, I dare say; and he
makes no reservations now. I can imagine nothing more honourable than
to devote one’s body to a dissecting-room out of mere gratitude to a
science that has helped us in life. But this is a dismal strain we are
in. Give us your song, Williams; dear old Albert Smith’s ‘Student’s
Alphabet.’”
Williams laid aside his pipe, and took a pull at the tankard of ale on
the mantel board, and began:—
THE STUDENT’S ALPHABET.
Oh, A was an Artery, filled with injection;
And B was a Brick, never caught at dissection.
C were some Chemicals—Lithium and Borax;
And D was the Diaphragm, flooring the thorax.
_Chorus._
Fol de rol lol,
Fol de rol lay,
Fol de rol, tol de rol, tol de rol lay.
E was an Embryo in a glass case;
And F a Foramen that pierced the skull’s base.
G was a Grinder who sharpen’d the tools;
And H means the Half-and-half drunk at the schools.
Fol de rol lol, etc.
I was some Iodine, made of sea-weed;
J was a Jolly Cock, not used to read.
K was some Kreosote, much over-rated;
And L were the Lies which about it were stated.
Fol de rol lol, etc.
M was a Muscle—cold, flabby, and red;
And N was a Nerve, like a bit of white thread.
O was some Opium a fool chose to take;
And P were the Pins used to keep him awake.
Fol de rol lol, etc.
Q were the Quacks, who cure stammer and squint;
R was a Raw from a burn, wrapped in lint.
S was a Scalpel, to eat bread and cheese;
And T was a Tourniquet, vessels to squeeze.
Fol de rol lol, etc.
U was the Unciform bone of the wrist;
V was the Vein which a blunt lancet missed.
W was Wax, from a syringe that flowed;
X was the ’Xaminers, who may be blowed!
Fol de rol lol, etc.
Y stands for You all, with best wishes sincere;
And Z for the Zanies who never touch beer.
So we’ve got to the end, not forgetting a letter;
And those who don’t like it may grind up a better.
Fol de rol lol, etc.
One of the party, a Mr. Randall, a second year’s man, was very groggy,
and it was rather unlucky that he was called out to a maternity case in
the midst of all this enjoyment. Not that he took it to heart much,
indeed he went with alacrity. He had to prove attendance on fifty cases
before he could compete for the Obstetric prize, and as this would
bring his number up to forty-three, it was important not to miss it; so
he left the company with many ribald jokes aimed at him, and was soon
in attendance on the unfortunate woman whose life, and that of her
babe, were entrusted to his care. The young man meant well, but he
would have been less scandalous to the assembled matrons had he been
sober. It seemed, however, so natural for a hospital student to be
slightly elevated, and the class of medical men who sent their boozy
unqualified assistants to look after their poorer clients had so
familiarized them with vinous doctors, that he got a better reception
than he deserved. Sometimes very terrible accidents arose in this way,
but nothing ever came of the investigations that followed. The staff of
the hospital, with their great names and solemn opinions, were always
at the service of the students to extricate them from a difficulty; and
had they amputated a patient’s head while serving their hospital, there
were plenty of good men with a string of letters to their names, who
would have been found to swear at the inquest that the treatment was
justified on high medical authority under the circumstances. This is
called medical _esprit de corps_, and it is born, bred, and educated in
our great medical schools.
Under the ægis of this protection there is very little that a student
cannot do with a live or a dead human subject. Nice for the subject,
especially if a live one! The interesting object of Mr. Randall’s
attendance on the evening in question recovered her health, and
ultimately died a natural death.
After Randall had started, Dobbs was called upon to tell a story. He
was good at this sort of thing; had written several capital tales for
the press, and was generally suspected of being engaged upon a medical
novel.
“Well, lads,” said he, after mixing himself a whisky and soda, “I will
tell you a true story to-night. I don’t think any of you know it, save
perhaps one or two. I don’t always feel in the vein for telling it, but
to-night I do. So here goes.
“It was one day towards the end of November, four years ago, when the
great fog lasted three whole days and nights without lifting. London
was in total darkness, save for the feeble ghostly glimmer the
gaslights gave here and there. There were few men about the place, but
I was working hard for a prize and could not leave town—every spare
moment was passed in the dissecting-room. On the afternoon of the day I
refer to, two or three fellows came bothering me to go and play
billiards with them. They were half screwed, and I was occupied with my
work and didn’t want their company. So as soon as I got rid of them I
took my ‘part’ down to the vaults below, where the coffins are kept
waiting for the weekly visit of the undertaker. I lit the gas, and soon
got absorbed in my work. It must have been about four o’clock when I
went below, because the fellows who had been bothering me had just left
the Anatomy Lecture, and nobody knew of my having done so at all. When
one gets interested in the brachial plexus, the flight of the hours
isn’t noticed, and I was first recalled to the fact that it was closing
time at the schools by hearing the heavy slam of the great iron door at
the top of the steps leading down to the vaults. Dropping my scalpel
with a rush, I made for the staircase, and in real terror of being
locked in for the night, shouted to be let out. No answer came; all I
could hear was the banging of more doors, fainter and fainter, as they
were more distant; and then, hearing the thud of the great outer door,
knew I was imprisoned for the night, with no chance of escape. When I
returned to my vault, of course the gas was turned off—the porters had
seen to that—and I was in total darkness. I had a box of vestas in my
pocket I had fortunately bought of an urchin as I came in, and luckily
had plenty of tobacco. Lighting a match, I began to explore the place
more carefully than I had done. I did not look for any means of getting
out, as I knew there were none; but I was very anxious not to spend the
night in darkness. On a shelf over the door there were a lot of bottles
and jars, containing the various fluids used in preserving the
subjects. To my great delight there was a big bottle of oil, and then I
knew I was all right for a light. This was something, at all events.
Knocking a large glass bottle to bits, I managed to make the bottom of
it into a fairish sort of lamp; and then, with a few slices of cork and
some of my wax matches, I rigged up two very decent floating wicks, and
set them alight. The glimmer was faint, and served rather to increase
the gloominess of the place, and exhibited my sleeping apartment in a
rather unpleasant aspect.”
“Why didn’t you burn the door?” asked Elsworth. “They always did that
in Dumas’ tales.”
“How could he when it’s iron, you donkey? Shut up; it seems _you_ never
do any quiet dissections,” said a young house surgeon.
“There was the body of a newly imported subject, that had just been got
ready for use upstairs, lying in ghastly whiteness on a coffin lid in
the middle of the place. I noticed that its right arm was attached to a
rope and pulley in the ceiling, and had been left in that position when
the beadle had injected his preservative fluid into the arteries. The
weight which acted as counterpoise was lying on a heap of old rags on
the edge of the table. I did not like the look of the raised arm; it
seemed pointing at me in a nasty ghostly sort of way, and I pulled it
down. Then exploring further, I came upon a great store of tow and old
sacking, and with these I made up a tidy sort of bed on a wide shelf,
and determined when bedtime came to try and get some sleep. I was
downright mad when I thought of my jolly little fire at my diggings,
and the kidneys and stout I had ordered for supper. I wasn’t in much of
a humour for reading, and had nothing to read with me except my Gray’s
Anatomy. I hadn’t light enough to dissect, or would have kept at it all
night. I could hear the clock of St. Andrew’s tolling out the lazy
hours—how long they seemed! At nine I couldn’t stand it any more, and
lay down on my shelf, and covering myself with the sacks tried to go to
sleep. It was past ten before I dropped off; my bed was most
uncomfortable, and my pillow too low—a low pillow always makes me
dream so. I rested badly, and soon awoke. As I lay thinking and praying
for morning, I became aware of a peculiar low moaning noise, as of some
creature in great pain in a distant corner, as it seemed. Listening
with the intensified sense that such circumstances arouse, I heard, in
addition to the moans, a regular clank of some machine working like a
bellows, and then I remembered that on the day before I had been trying
some experiments on two dogs in the next vault. To one I had given
curare, and had to keep his respiration going by Paul Bert’s beautiful
little machine, invented for the purpose; the other dog had been
horribly mangled by Crowe, and ought to have been killed, but there was
a question of the bile duct on which I hadn’t completely satisfied
myself, and he told me to take the animal below, and I am ashamed to
say I had forgotten the poor little beggar.”
“Was that the rough little terrier which followed Dr. Arnold in the
Laboratory when he was starving? I have heard him laugh at the
misplaced confidence of the brute,” said Elsworth.
“The very animal,” replied the story-teller.
“But, I say, you had no licence, you know!” said Wilks, a shy,
curate-looking freshman, who belonged to several humanitarian
societies, and thought all this very dreadful.
The roar of laughter with which the delicious joke was received made
poor Wilks blush to the roots of his hair, as one of the audience cried:
“Licence be hanged! Do you think we care for the fanatics who impede
our work? Let them show themselves at St. Bernard’s! Crowe has one,
because it looks well to the public; but don’t you preach, Wilks, or
you’ll do for yourself. Go on.”
“Now when I was at work on the physiology part of the business, I never
thought of the cruelty, but now it all came upon me horribly. My
position was bad enough, but these poor dogs—animals, like
ourselves—they were in cruel agony without food or water. I was only
not on a feather bed, that was all; they were dying in awful torment. I
thought my imprisonment was all arranged by a higher Power, to let me
know what I was doing; and God knows I suffered shame and mental
distress that night. I fell asleep at last, though the moans and the
clockwork worked themselves into my dreams. All at once a loud noise
aroused me. I started up, and to my unutterable horror, saw the arm of
the corpse on the coffin lid slowly rising, and pointing its rigid hand
at me in the dim light. I am no coward, as you know; but my heart was
in my mouth as I stared with starting eyeballs at the ghastly object,
and then I saw what had happened. The counterpoise of the pulley had
slipped down, and dragged up the right arm of the corpse. It was the
falling of the weight on the floor of the vault that awoke me. Just
then the clock struck three, and I left the arm pointing its stiff
fingers at me and went to sleep again—‘to sleep, to dream.’ I dreamt
that two awful-looking burkers had brought a subject in, had taken
their gold from the place where it lay ready for them, and had caught
sight of me. ‘Why, Bill,’ said one, ‘here’s a chance; let us smother
this bloke, and he’ll be worth another five-pun-note to us!’ ‘Right you
are, Tom!’ said the other. And they proceeded to carry out their
diabolical plans, when I awoke. Horrible night-mare! I shudder now when
I think of it.”
“Rather creepy, I must say,” said little Murphy.
“Well, I could not sleep any more after that, and lay a-meditating.
After all, I thought, why shouldn’t I have been murdered and given up
to science, as I had done with those wretched dogs in the next room?
Did not the same Power frame their bodies as mine? Were not the
processes Nature so lovingly and carefully carried on in their
sensitive little frames just as beautiful and well adapted as those
which went on in me? I repented, my lads, that night, and I have never
spoken to Crowe since, and have done with that sort of work.”
“Ah! you are a sentimentalist,” they cried; “but tell us how you got
out.”
“Oh, I got through the night somehow—an end comes to everything sooner
or later; but the scoundrelly porters were later than usual that
morning before they opened the place. Jim, the sweeper, was in a
beastly funk, and implored me not to tell anybody, because it was his
place to look round the vaults before closing; but he says the fog had
got into him, and the other porter had asked him to go and have some
hot spiced ale with him, and he was anxious he should not change his
mind.”
It was getting late, and Mrs. Harper knocked at the door with “Time!
gentlemen; time!” Of course she was asked in and invited to have a
toothful.
“As my spasms was just a-comin’ on, strange to say, gentlemen, as up
the stairs I came, I don’t mind if I do. Just a thimbleful; no, Mr.
Murphy! not a drop beyond the pretty part, and cold I’ll have it
to-night. It does me most good when the liquor is strong. Here’s your
very good ’ealth, gentlemen, and may you all have lots of practice when
you’ve done with the ’orspital; and what’s more, lots of fees, and good
’uns.”
“Well done, missus,” said all the men; “you could not have wished us
anything better.”
“And now, gentlemen, I thank you for your kindness, but shut up my
house I must; so I hope you will pardon me if I ask you to clear out.
Oh! lawks, Mr. Murphy; I ’opes to goodness the perlice won’t see this
blessed board, nor these knockers and things. I chops up that there
‘Similar—attached Willa Residence’ to-morrow for the fires. I said you
should have it for your party, but no more of it—not if I knows it.
Now, gents! Good-night! good-night!” And she got rid of them, and they
went rollicking home.