AN IDEAL PHYSICIAN.
The Christ Himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless He had given the life, too, with the law.
—_Elizabeth B. Browning._
He hansels not his new experiments on the bodies of his patients,
letting loose mad receipts into the sick man’s body, to try how
well nature in him will fight against them, whilst himself stands
by and sees the battle.—_Thomas Fuller._
Darwin spending whole nights watching pots of earth-worms, and studying
minutely the habits of these creatures—Thoreau exiling himself from
civilization that he might learn how to live cheerfully and healthily,
in company with the animals of the forest, are examples of the true
method of learning from Nature. There can be no real sympathy with
those with whom we have to deal apart from an intense desire to know
them intimately. Can we expect to reach the heart of Nature except by
the royal road of love?
Elsworth learned this in his voluntary exile,—learned that he could
interrogate Nature, get at her secrets and apply them to the healing of
mankind, when he had reverently put off the shoes from his feet and
entered her temple as a worshipper, rather than as the devastator
placing the abomination of desolation in the holy place. The secret of
Nature, as of the Lord, is with them that fear her.
To analyse a rose is a poor way of learning the sweetness of its
perfume; to master the language of a country is of the first necessity
to knowing anything about its people.
The Monte Sagrado is reached by a road made through the hill of the
Albayzin, which overhangs it on one side. Everywhere we see masses of
enormous Indian figs, or prickly pear, the fruit which for months
together forms the chief diet of the gipsy population. They live in a
quarter by themselves, outside the city, as did the Jews in their
_ghettos_ in Italy. In Granada they are more settled in their habits
than in other places, with the exception of Seville. Their dwellings
are caves dug out of the hill-side, and it is very curious to see the
smoke from their fires issuing from holes in the ground amongst the
Indian fig plants. Very dirty and smoky are these grottoes; the only
daylight which can enter them comes through the doorway. As a rule, the
furniture is of the most wretched description, though some of the
burrows are better off in this respect than the rest. These poor folk
are much looked down upon by their Spanish rulers, to conciliate whom
they pretend to be good Catholics—in the old days of the Inquisition a
not unnecessary affectation. They excel in many ingenious trades, best
of all in horse dealing and thieving, professions nearly allied in most
countries. Social pariahs as they have ever been, it need not excite
any surprise that they are depraved and ignorant, though, as they have
some noble qualities, they must be capable of great improvement when an
age of wider sympathy and diminished race prejudice shall enable their
neighbours to do justice to them.
They are at war with mankind because they have always been cruelly
oppressed and ill-treated; but as in our own country a George Smith of
Coalville and a George Borrow in Spain have found the gipsy character
well repay the efforts made to improve it, we may fairly hope
Christianity will ultimately conquer even this stubborn race. They are
light-hearted, clever, courteous, and forgiving, generous, and kind
even, to strangers in distress; great lovers of Nature, and full of
affection for dumb creatures; surely in such a race there must be the
material for improvement!
Rico, the gipsy king, soon became warmly attached to Elsworth, who
spent many a pleasant hour in his sooty hut; pigs, fowls, and children
wallowed and grovelled together in the mud-floored cabin, which was
more suggestive of the Green Isle than of lordly Spain.
It was worth a journey to Granada to hear and see Rico play the guitar.
The instrument only really _lives_ in Spain, elsewhere it is but a
feeble, voiceless toy; here it speaks, declaims, rouses and fires the
brain, but then that is because the performer and the instrument become
one. Rico’s guitar was part of himself, not only the strings but the
body of the thing.
Often he would gather round him some of the young men and women of the
colony, who would accompany his playing with plantive, weird singing
and hand-clapping, in perfect tune, strange Eastern dances, with wild
gesticulation and choruses which seemed reminiscences of ancient
Greece. In return Elsworth, with hearty, manly sympathy, would recite
some sweet narrative from the Gospels, and win his way to the hearts of
these poor people by stories of the Saviour’s love.
Amulets, charms, fetishes, all these they knew. How the King of Heaven
loved the despised Romany people, this was a strange thing to them
which the Englishmen had come to teach. But it touched their hearts,
poor outcasts!
When he had completed the translation of the Gospel of St. Luke into
their language, they would listen with apparent interest to his reading
by hours together. This was not the sort of Christianity that had
before been presented to them. In its grand simplicity and manifest
adaptation to the wants of these wandering children of Nature, surely
here if anywhere, was the ideal religion for them; and as for their
teacher, who lived their life and proved in a hundred ways his devotion
to their interests, who showed that he loved these people, outcast and
despised as they were, because of his honour to them as children of the
same Father whom he loved, surely they were bound to treat his mission
with respect.
And so four years had gone by. He had journeyed with the gipsies into
many parts of Spain, but had always returned to Granada as his home, as
the centre for his work and life interest.
How real and earnest a life he was living now! On this lofty height
overlooking the historic scenes which had occupied so large a space in
the annals of the past, what wonder if to an ardent poetic mind,
romantic yet intensely practical, there often came, in moments of deep
sympathy with mankind born of the love of God, high aspirations after
noble deeds, and the determination, when his hour came, to go down into
the arena and bear his part manfully in the fight! No, Elsworth was not
skulking in idle retirement; not shirking his share of work; but
because of a deep conviction that there was work for him to do which
required his retirement to fit him for it he stayed, and did what lay
to his hand, and waited for the summons.
The life of the hermits of the Theban Desert was a violation of common
sense and true religion, inasmuch as it was all preface and no book;
all preparation and girding on of armour, and no work; all tuning of
instruments, and no music. The great wonder is, how the fanatics could
have stood it so long.
Elsworth found that doctors were not held in nearly such high esteem in
Spain as in England. They pursued the barbaric methods of treatment
which were in vogue here at the beginning of this century, and which,
if followed now, would subject the practitioner to a trial for
manslaughter. Spain is so far behind the rest of Europe in everything,
that it can easily be imagined how perilous it is for an invalid to
fall into the hands of the sangrados even of the present day. The
Spaniards are celebrated for their proverbs, not a few of which are
aimed at the doctors. A popular rhyme goes like this:—
“And, doctor, do you really think
That asses’ milk I ought to drink?
It cured yourself, I grant it true;
But then ’twas mother’s milk to you!”
His fourth autumn had been passed in Spain, when another terrible
epidemic of cholera broke out in Granada and other cities of Andalusia.
Now he seemed to learn why he had been sent, hither. Now he could test
the reality of his conversion. Now he would realise the dignity of his
calling and the strength of his humanity. And he did not flinch.
His skill in sanitary matters and his surgical knowledge stood him in
good stead. A good head for mechanics, much common sense, and a
readiness of resource had already enabled him to save many of his
Gitano friends from the hospitals they so much dreaded. He could mend
their broken limbs with extemporised splints, reduce dislocations, and
dress wounds antiseptically; and by cheering them by the infusion of
his own light-heartedness, shorten their period of convalescence. To be
sure, they had their own well-tried methods of cure, which were not so
contemptible, though unrecognised in the schools. Having small faith in
drugs, and smaller still in their wholesale administration by ignorant
and unthinking practitioners, his medicine chest seldom needed
replenishing. He valued his opium (_Mash Allah_, the gift of God, the
Turks call it), but administered it with scrupulous care. Quinine was
indispensable, and a dozen other well-tried remedies enabled him to
work many a cure. But cold water and fresh air, wholesome food and
temperance, want few aids from medicine for the ills of man. The wiser
the physician the fewer the drugs, and by the length of your doctor’s
prescription you may estimate the shallowness of his pretence to wisdom.
Sanitary engineers have done so much for the improvement of the health
of towns, that the low death-rate in London and other English cities is
more to be attributed to their agency than to improved methods of
medical treatment. The wonder is that Spain and Italy are not
continually decimated by pestilence. We may see what was the state of
England in the time of the Black Death and the Great Plague by the
condition of Naples and Granada under recent cholera visitations; the
most elementary sanitary precautions being not only neglected but
apparently impossible of comprehension by the people generally, so that
the soil is always ready for the seeds of disease.
Elsworth was in robust health and vigour while he lived at Granada.
Every morning he took two hours’ exercise on his bicycle into the open
country of the Vega. His daily bath, the simplicity of his diet, his
entire abstention from alcohol, and his scrupulous care to drink no
water which he had not himself carefully boiled and filtered, with his
cheerful, well-occupied mind, prevented him from taking any complaint
during his work amongst the sick. He was well received by the poor folk
he visited; and though the local doctors and priests looked coldly on
his work, he had no difficulty in finding cases neglected by both,
where his services were eagerly welcomed. Ho found amongst the very
poor a strange prejudice against the doctors, who were ignorantly
accused of giving the disease to the people to lessen the population.
This seems to have had its origin in the inoculations practised by a
disciple of Pasteur, and which undoubtedly did cause many deaths. There
is such a widespread dislike of the priests among Spanish men, not
altogether to be marvelled at by those who know the country, that the
religious ministrations of this young English surgeon were often
acceptable where the public functionary would have had scant courtesy.
The authorities of the town recognised his work, and gave him
permission to act as a medical man when they had satisfied themselves
as to his qualifications. He attempted no concealment. Why should he?
The British vice-consul of the city, a wealthy old Scotchman, the head
of a firm of mining engineers, soon became a good friend to him. He was
a Presbyterian of the good old school, with convictions about the Man
of Sin and the Scarlet Lady, and loved Spain chiefly for the lead his
firm extracted from the bowels of her mountains. Being a man of
considerable standing in the city, and withal highly respected for his
probity and charity, he had no difficulty in making easy the sort of
work Elsworth aspired to do in the public service.
Naturally the authorities did not at first relish suggestions from a
foreigner about improved drainage and water supply, though when they
came to know the clever young surgeon, and had listened to his sensible
proposals anent accumulations of refuse and dust, they gradually
adopted many of his suggestions. Daily he spent many hours visiting
amongst the most poverty stricken and dirty inhabitants. He spent the
greater part of his income in helping his patients with suitable food
and clothing. His missionary work was done by a few kind words here and
there; with loving counsels and the sympathy which comes with a sense
of the higher relationship of man to man through the All-Father, he won
his way to the hearts of all. Virtue went out of him, and health and
peace seemed to follow his steps. He was as much at home with the
Catholic people of Granada as he would have been in the courts and
alleys of London; he was as welcome in the homes of the atheist and
gipsy, the red Republican and anarchist, as with the family of the
Presbyterian vice-consul; and all because the pervading sense of God’s
love for man had taken possession of his life. His sympathies were too
wide for the influence of bigotry; he was as a traveller from a far
country, who has long been homeless and a wanderer, not at all in the
humour to trouble himself with the squabbles of his vestry, or the
quarrels of the political clubs of the town he has come back to rest in.
Elsworth had recovered the lost idea of a loving God and Saviour of
men. What to him did it matter, all these hair-splitting dogmas and
wranglings of theologians? the recovered treasure was too precious to
neglect for the ornaments of the casket in which it was contained.
So he daily went about doing good. By his constant visitation of the
people he was able to detect the earliest stages of the pestilence
which was destroying so many; then by prompt and judicious treatment he
was often successful in arresting its progress. His fame spread, and he
was often called in to attend rich sufferers, from whom he refused to
take any fees, as he considered himself the servant of the poor. If
they chose to make him presents, as they often did, he took them with
the understanding that their gifts should be devoted to charitable
purposes.
He often went to Mr. MacAlister’s home, at the Vice-Consulate, close by
the cathedral. The old gentleman was rather afraid of infection; but as
the doctor always changed his clothing before paying visits to his
friends, he took his word for it that there was no cause for alarm.
He rented at a very low rate, through the kindness of a member of the
municipal council, an old monastery which had been taken by the
Government on the expulsion of the monks, and was now let to a
furniture dealer; and turned it into a small but serviceable hospital
for cholera patients. Funds were readily provided for its support, and
there was no difficulty in inducing sufferers to avail themselves of
it, as was the case with the great hospitals of the place, which they
dreaded to enter. They knew they would be safe in Doctor Elsworth’s
hands; he wanted to try no experiments upon them, and was not (as they
foolishly thought the other doctors were) in league with the Government
for getting rid of them.
Mr. MacAlister’s daughters nobly came forward and helped in the
nursing. They found amongst their English and American friends resident
in the town abundant means for carrying on the plan, without any
Spanish assistance in this branch of the work. Spanish ladies, even if
available, would have been of little service. Even Spanish nuns are not
very valuable as nurses, and the best Catholic charities are recruited
from France. Spanish women can do the devotional part of the work, they
say; but that is about all they are good for. The bringing up of a
Spanish woman tends to make her ornamental merely, and surely she is of
the loveliest of her sex. She spends the greater part of her day in
bed, rises and adorns herself for dinner; then the _tertulia_, with its
music and dancing winds up her waking hours, and by midnight she is
again in bed. This is poor material for making sick nurses or sisters
of mercy.
They had only twenty beds in Elsworth’s hospital. Their principal
disinfectant was fresh air, for our surgeon was not greatly in love
with carbolic acid and the other disinfecting fetishes, which are
probably about as powerful for evil and powerless for good as any which
the African venerates.