“SHOD WITH WOOL!”
There is no strange handwriting on the wall,
Thro’ all the midnight hum no threatening call,
Nor on the marble floor the stealthy fall
Of fatal footsteps. All is safe. Thou fool,
The avenging deities are shod with wool!
—_W. Allen Butler._
But the sinner who would fain
Cover murder’s crimson stain,
Still shall find his steps pursued
By inquisitors for blood,
Due to the unavenged dead,
Our malison devotes his head.
—_J. Anstice, translated from Æschylus._
The last week in September usually sees all the teachers and staff of
the hospitals back at their posts. Mr. Crowe and Dr. Graves were again
in harness, and the patients who had been the objects of ’prentice work
now came under master hands.
These long vacations are grand times for the junior staff; then they
are the lords of the territory, and can try everything without fear of
interference from their superiors who do not want any more information
on what perhaps interests their juniors keenly.
Mr. Mole had been working away patiently and secretly. He had a vast
accumulation of notes of facts, symptoms, and tests on the action of
Lorchelin and Bulbosin on man and animals; and what was of equal
importance, no one had apparently even suspected his secret. No one
except Dr. Sones, and from him he kept nothing, requesting only that
outside the walls of his laboratory no word of the business was to pass.
All Dr. Sones’ efforts to find chemical tests for the poisons
which could be absolutely relied upon had been fruitless. Mr. Mole
was, however, so satisfied with his physiological tests that he
declared himself ready to detect the deadly alkaloids under whatever
circumstances they might be administered. Suspecting Mr. Crowe of
entertaining a very limited amount of affection for his wife, and
knowing how he must estimate the burden of her long-continued illness,
he imparted his suspicions to Janet Spriggs, and bade her tell him
everything fresh that happened. But there was little to tell. A caution
was given to her that should her mistress suddenly die, two or three
handkerchiefs were to be dropped as by accident in the remains of the
last food of which she had partaken, and especially in anything that
might be vomited. These handkerchiefs were then to be given to him.
The winter session had commenced about a month; the lecturers had all
returned to their posts and patients, and the work at St. Bernard’s was
again in full swing. In all the wards you heard little hints, jokes,
and anecdotes of the holiday tours and adventures of the doctors—very
impressive to the students, very suggestive of the good things in store
for them when they had made their mark and could take expensive trips.
The poor assistant surgeons and physicians had been compelled to stick
to their work all through the vacation, and heard with rather mitigated
relish the stories told by their chiefs of Norway, Switzerland, Italy,
or Spain.
Mr. Crowe was full of the latter country, and the backward condition of
everything there. He found nothing doing of importance for research but
some Pasteur inoculations. He had visited many of the Spanish hospitals
and schools of medicine, but everything was backward in comparison with
France or Germany. Tho Spaniards, he thought, were unwilling to embrace
the new theories which were helping the world forward. He had only met
three physiologists who lived up to the true ideal of a modern
scientist. One at Salamanca, who, having discovered the bacillus of
phthisis in the sputa of a patient, had inoculated with the germs one
of his own children several times, with a view to watching the rise and
progress of the disease. Another at Valladolid had carried out a long
series of experiments in brain localisation on a mule-driver who had
fallen over a precipice, and was taken to the hospital with a portion
of his brain exposed so conveniently that it could be galvanised as
readily as one of Professor Ferrier’s monkeys, and was consequently a
most valuable means of confirming that gentleman’s theories. The third
he met at Madrid, and he had done wonders at his hospital by ordering a
number of his patients, who were either cooks or butchers, to eat daily
a portion of raw beef (persons of these professions are usually quite
ready to do this), for the purpose of introducing into their systems
the parasite _Tænia mediocanellata_.
As epilepsy, hysteria, convulsions, and even insanity have been known
to follow the introduction of this interesting parasite into the human
body, it must be admitted that Professor Montijo was one of the heroic
school, and merited all Mr. Crowe’s eulogiums. Some of the alumni who
listened to these accounts of continental practice thought that the
first man was the only true hero of the lot. He, Abraham-like, had been
willing to sacrifice his own son “for the good of humanity.” As for the
mule-driver and his exposed brain, they had done quite as good things
at St. Bernard’s more than once; while in regard to the hydatid and
tape-worm germs in beef and pork, that was an every-day business down
in the out-patient department, and a very meek sort of experiment for a
St. Bernard’s man.
Dr. Stanforth told his class a good thing from Milan, where a
tremendous experiment, involving risk to the lives of several women,
had been tried by a friend of his at the Maternity Hospital. He
admitted it was rather hard on the women, who had sought the comforts
of the hospital for quite other reasons; but it was a point which
needed clearing up, and the learned professor, with the unwitting
assistance of eight patients (and eight other lives especially
protected by the laws of God and man, he forgot to add), had settled
the question on behalf of therapeutics for ever.
“This is the heroic work we need so much in England. They are not
nearly so timid in other countries as we are. We must have a policy of
‘thorough,’ or we shall be left behind.” And he set his lips firmly,
and looked as though henceforth his patients were going to have “a bad
time.”
Mr. Mole was doing all his little best to bring about this scientific
millennium, but just then was not able to produce the results of his
work, as the time was not ripe for his revelations.