“ANOTHER PATIENT, SISTER!”
He was happier using the knife than in trying to save the
limb.—_Tennyson._
And whom have ye knowen die honestly
Without help of the Poticary?—_Heywood._
Dr. Stanforth was considered a model hospital physician—for the
students. They were ever the first in his thoughts; to touch one of
them was to touch the apple of his eye. He lived for them (and by
them), yet he never allowed any of his patients to suspect anything
of the kind. There was nothing he grudged his pupils, and they
consequently worshipped him. To serve any of his boys he would
sacrifice the feelings of any interesting bit of “clinical material”
that came in his way, and he boasted that he turned out more proficient
practitioners than any one of his colleagues. His methods were
startling even to them, and many were the wrinkles he put them up to.
His fame in his speciality—gynæcology, was so great, and his really
remarkable abilities so well recognised, that nothing he did, startling
though it was to the outside world, diminished the crowds of patients
who flocked to his consulting rooms. Of course he had the _bonhomie_
and social tact that are needful in attaching young men to a teacher;
he was, in addition, able to prove to them that by attending his
practice they were acquiring a practical knowledge of their work which
they could obtain in no other way.
Dr. Stanforth held all his patients at the disposal of any pupil of his
who desired to do or see something new. “Do what you like, my lad,” he
used to say to a favourite assistant. “You are in these wards to learn
all you can, and all my beds are at your service. Would you like to do
a gastrotomy? You ought to do one or two before you leave; it’s a very
pretty operation. I never knew a case survive more than a week; but
there’s nothing like trying, and if you pick out a case that must die
any way, you are welcome to use any of my cases that we can get to
consent: and with Sister Agnes’ help—Sister is capital at getting
consent to anything, aren’t you Sister?—it can generally be managed.
Yes, you had better do one or two; it will be a fashionable operation
before long. Rabbits do very well with it, better than dogs in my
hands; but humans don’t take nicely to it at all. Now, don’t scruple to
let me know anything you’d like to do. I owe you something good for
keeping that pretty Pemphigus going so nicely while I was on my
holiday—very good of you, very good indeed—I sha’n’t forget you;
bye-bye.”
At what awful cost all this was to the “material” he never troubled to
estimate. The scandal at last got too strong for St. Bernard’s, and he
was soon promoted “out of the opportunities of his art”—as he
complained.
“Sister, let us have another patient!” said Dr. Stanforth, on one
occasion, just as one might say, “Hand me another chair,” or “Bring me
another book.” It was in the private operating room at St. Bernard’s,
screened off from the ward specially set apart for women. The assistant
physician of this important department had invented a new apparatus for
administering anæsthetics, and it was tried that day for the first
time—tried on hospital patients first, of course. It promised
materially to assist in bringing the patient under the influence of the
anæsthetic with rapidity and comfort. Being a complicated machine, with
various ingeniously constructed valves, it was not by any means an easy
thing to manage, and the least error might have fatal consequences; it
would never do, therefore, to use such a thing out of doors till all
its bearings had been taken at the hospital, where any mishap could be
adroitly attributed to some other cause. Long before one dare use such
a thing on Lady Millefleurs, its capabilities and little eccentricities
must be exhibited on the unimportant carcass of Eliza Smith; and so it
fell out that day that a little knot of students, interested in giving
chloroform or ether, with due address, were assembled to see the
working of this pretty bit of mechanism.
Dr. Stanforth was an amiable creature, who lived and worked for, and
devoted all his energies to his “boys,” as he called his students; for
them he spared his patients neither shame nor pang; for them his beds
were occupied by so much “teaching stuff.” He was skilful to cure, but
at St. Bernard’s he often forebore to cure too rapidly, lest the
“pretty case” might get well before all his boys had had their fill of
it. It was far better, he used to say, that a patient should “bide a
wee,” if any interest attached to her case, than that any budding
obstetrician should leave the hospital imperfectly equipped with all
the weapons he required. “Have as many patients as you want, my lad,”
he said; “let us get the thing right while we are about it.” “The
thing” was the new apparatus, and on its first trial on patient number
one, had narrowly escaped sending her to kingdom come by suffocation.
She appeared to be “going off lovely,” as funny Mr. Philips said, till
Dr. Stanforth, suddenly turning round in the middle of a droll story
about his friend “Wales and the actress,” seized the patient’s hand,
and declared she was “going” in quite another sense. Artificial
respiration was performed, and the woman restored to life and
consciousness. It was generous not to subject her to any further
experiment that day, and she was sent back to her bed, which she had
not left for any benefit likely, under any circumstances, to accrue to
herself, while the instrument which had so terribly failed was
carefully examined for the cause of the mishap. On taking it to pieces,
a mechanical genius amongst the students found that a valve had got
fixed, and as it was speedily put to rights, the operator was
encouraged by Dr. Stanforth with “Better luck next time my boy. Sister,
let us have another patient!” How the sister managed to induce a second
woman to undergo a mysterious ordeal, the purport of which she was not
permitted to question, and after the experiences of the first victim,
which did not appear to the curious ward as having been altogether
pleasant, we do not pretend to understand; but hospital sisters who
know their business have clever little ways whereby they aid and abet
the doctors in their search for wisdom. Sister Agnes had long felt that
her conscience was being overstrained at St. Bernard’s. Her work was
developing itself as quite other than she had expected when she gave
herself up to the life of a nurse. These good women, at any rate, had a
lofty ideal, and followed it with no hope of other than its own reward.
They were not seeking fame, or money, or any worldly reward; it was no
wonder therefore that a noble-minded woman like Sister Agnes should see
that unless the great work of her life, for which she had given up all
else, were undeviatingly followed, she at any rate had failed in
attaining her mission. It was not to help doctors to get knowledge; it
was not by trickery and “white lies,” used to induce defenceless
sufferers to submit to horrible ordeals, and indescribably painful
examinations for no benefit to themselves, but simply to teach their
business to young men, that she had devoted herself to work in the
wards of a general hospital. And daily the conduct of Dr. Stanforth and
his assistants clearly showed that the patient’s benefit was quite a
secondary object, and the chief end of his or her residence in the
wards of St. Bernard’s was precisely that of an artist’s model visiting
a studio. Very good, doubtless, in its way, but not what the main body
of hospital subscribers intend; still less what the patients come for,
and only partially, surely, what such as she had left the world to aid.
In a word, she saw plainly that the whole system of the modern hospital
in great cities was a gigantic sham, a cruel fraud on the subscribers,
and an atrocious delusion and a snare to the patients themselves.
How difficult a task it would be to convince the world of all this!
What an Augean stable for a weak woman to cleanse! Then again nothing
annoys the public more than to open the doors of its whited sepulchres.
Of course, it was no use to condemn the present system without putting
something better in its place. The workhouse infirmary was far better
in one sense; there, the object was to help the patient to get well as
speedily as possible, and take himself off the books; but there
attaches a stigma to the infirmary from which the hospital is free, yet
the hospital must be reformed on the model, in some respects, of the
infirmaries.
The sister was a clever woman, a woman of ample means, and with great
influence; why should not this be her life-work to found a new order of
charity? It had been the work of many a noble woman to do greater
things than this, and with apparently less foothold; and that night,
before she went to rest, she prayed that strength and wisdom might be
given to her to carry out the scheme which was taking hold upon her
heart. “I shall want half a million of money to make a beginning. What
is that? A man dies, and leaves a quarter of a million to a college of
anatomy and surgery, to be spent in skeletons and pickled specimens of
curious fish and odd deformities. Many a man’s picture gallery has had
that spent upon it; it might buy a moderately good ironclad; would make
a mile or two of suburban railway, and execute a few hundred yards of
submarine tunnel. Somebody will come along who will see with me that
humanity and cruelty, whom God hath disjoined eternally, shall not be
forced into unholy union. Let me be the Joan of Arc to fight this out.”
But not yet. She must arrange her plan of campaign, collect her forces.
So enormous a task must demand an adequate inception, and though she
shrank from nothing, she ventured nothing rashly.