I have had patients enough in a busy life as a working surgeon, you may
be sure, but of all that I have had, young or old, give me your genuine,
simple-hearted working man; for whether he be down with an ordinary
sickness or an extraordinary accident, he is always the same--enduring,
forbearing, hopeful, and with that thorough faith in his medical man
that does so much towards helping on a cure.
Wealthy patients as a rule do not possess that faith in their doctor.
They always seem to expect that a disease which has been coming on,
perhaps, for months, can be cured right off in a few hours by a touch of
the doctor's hand. If this result does not follow, and I may tell you
at once it never does--unless it be in a case of toothache, and a tooth
is drawn--the patient is peevish and fretful, the doctor is looked upon
as unskilful, and, money being no object, the chances are that before
the doctor or surgeon has had a chance, another practitioner is called
in.
On the other hand, a quiet stalwart working man comes to you with a
childlike faith and simplicity; he is at one with you; and he helps his
cure by his simple profound belief in your skill.
A great deal of working-class doctoring and surgery has fallen to my
lot, for fate threw me into a mixed practice. Sooner than wait at home
idle for patients who might never come, I have made a point of taking
any man's practice _pro tem_, while the owner was ill, or away upon a
holiday, and so improved my own knowledge better than I should have done
by reading ever so hard. The consequence is that I have been a good
deal about the country, and amongst a great variety of people, and the
result of my experience is that your genuine working man, if he has been
unspoiled by publicans, and those sinners, the demagogues, who are
always putting false notions into his head, is a thoroughly sterling
individual. That is the rule. I need not quote the exceptions, for
there are black sheep enough among them, even as there are among other
classes. Take him all in all, the British workman is a being of whom we
may well be proud, and the better he is treated the brighter the colours
in which he will come out.
Of course he has his weak points; we all have them, and very unpleasant
creatures we should be without. A man all strong points is the kind of
being to avoid. Have nothing to do with him. Depend upon it the
finest--the most human of God's creatures, are those who have their
share of imperfections mingled with the good that is in every one more
or less.
They are men, these workers, who need the surgeon more than ordinary
people, for too often their lives are the lives of soldiers fighting in
the battle of life; and many are the wounded and slain.
I used at one time--from no love of the morbid, please bear in mind, but
from genuine desire to study my profession--to think that I should like
to go out as an army surgeon, and be with a regiment through some
terrible war. For it seemed to me that nothing could do more towards
making a professional man prompt and full of resources than being called
upon to help his suffering fellow-creatures--shot down, cut down,
trampled beneath horses' feet, blown up, bayoneted, hurt in one of the
thousand ways incidental to warfare, besides suffering from the many
diseases that follow in an army's train. But I very soon learned that
there was no need for any such adventure, for I could find ample demands
on such poor skill as I possessed by devoting myself to the great army
of toilers fighting in our midst. Talk of demands upon a man's energy
and skill; calls upon his nerve; needs for promptness and presence of
mind! There are plenty such in our every-day life; for, shocking as it
may sound, the tale of killed and wounded every week in busy England is
terribly heavy. Go to some manufacturing town where steam hisses and
pants, and there is the throb and whirr of machinery from morn till
night--yes, and onward still from night to morn--where the furnaces are
never allowed to slacken--go there and visit the infirmary, and you will
find plenty of wounded in the course of the year. You have the same
result, too, in the agricultural districts, where, peaceful as is the
labourer's pursuit, he cannot avoid mishaps with horses, waggons,
threshing-machines, even with his simple working tools. In busy London
itself the immense variety of calls upon the surgeon's skill leaves him
little to desire in the way of experience.
Many years of sheer toil have caused a kind of friendship to grow up
between me and the working man. In fact I consider myself a working
man, and a hard-worker. I have told you how I like him for a patient,
but I have not told you of the many good qualities that I have found,
too often lying latent in his breast. Those I will touch upon
incidentally in the course of these pages, for years ago the fancy came
upon me to make a kind of note-book of particular cases, principally for
my own amusement. Not a surgical or medical note-book, but a few short
jottings of the peculiarities of the cases, and these short jottings
grew into long ones, so that now I present them to the reader as so many
sketches of working men--adventures, that is to say, met with in their
particular avocations.
Sometimes I have been called in to attend the workman for the special
case of which his little narrative treats, for I have thought it better
for the most part to let him tell his story in his own words; and now I
come to look through my collection--the gatherings of many years--I find
that I have a strange variety of incident, some of which in their peril
and danger will show those who have never given a thought to such a
subject, how many are the risks to which the busy ants of our great hill
are exposed, and how often they go about their daily tasks with their
lives in their hands.