Hospital Memoranda, Sept. 21st.
--Private William Carter, æt. 24; admitted a week to-day. Gastric
fever--typhoid form--slight delirium--bad case. Asked me to write to
his mother--did not say where. _Mem_. to enquire among his division if
anything is known about his friends.
Corporal Thomas Hardman, æt. 50--Delirium tremens--mending. Knew him in
the Crimea, when he was a perfectly sober fellow, with constitution
of iron. "Trench work did it," he says, "and last winter's idleness."
_Mem_. to send for him after his discharge from hospital, and see what
can be done; also to see that decent body, his wife, after my rounds
tomorrow.
M. U.--Max Urquhart.--Max Urquhart, M.D., M.R.C.S.
--Who keeps scribbling his name up and down this page like a silly
school-boy, just for want of something to do.
Something to do! Never for these twenty years and more have I been so
totally without occupation.
What a place this camp is! worse than ours in the Crimea, by far. To-day
especially. Rain pouring, wind howling, mud ancle-deep; nothing on earth
for me to be, to do, or to suffer, except--yes! there is something to
suffer--Treherne's eternal flute.
Faith, I must be very hard up for occupation when I thus continue this
journal of my cases into a personal diary of the worst patient I have to
deal with--the most thankless, unsatisfactory, and unkindly. Physician,
heal thyself! But how?
I shall tear out this page,--or stay, I'll keep it as a remarkable
literary and psychological fact--and go on with my article on Gunshot
Wounds.
*****
In the which, two hours after, I find, I have written exactly ten lines.
These must be the sort of circumstances under which people commit
journals. For some do--and heartily as I have always contemned the
proceeding, as we are prone to contemn peculiarities and idiosyncrasies
quite foreign to our own,--I begin to-day dimly to understand the state
of mind in which such a thing might be possible.
"Diary of a Physician" shall I call it?--did not some one write a book
with that title? I picked it up on ship-board--a story-book or some such
thing--but I scarcely ever read what is called "light literature." I
have never had time. Besides, all fictions grow tame, compared to the
realities of daily life, the horrible episodes of crime, the pitiful
bits of hopeless misery that I meet with in my profession. Talk of
romance!--
Was I ever romantic? Once perhaps. Or at least I might have been.
My profession, truly there is nothing like it for me. Therein I find
incessant work, interest, hope. Daily do I thank heaven that I had
courage to seize on it and go through with it, in order--according to
the phrase I heard used last night--"to save life instead of destroying
it."
Poor little girl--she meant nothing--she had no idea what she was
saying.
Is it that which makes me so unsettled today?
Perhaps it would be wiser never to go into society. A hospital-ward is
far more natural to me than a ball-room. There, is work to be done,
pain to be alleviated, evil of all kinds to be met and overcome--here,
nothing but pleasure, nothing to do but to enjoy.
Yet some people can enjoy; and actually do so; I am sure that girl did.
Several times during the evening she looked quite happy. I do not often
see people looking happy.
Is suffering then our normal and natural state? Is to exist synonymous
with to endure? Can this be the law of a beneficent Providence?--or are
such results allowed--to happen in certain exceptional cases, utterly
irremediable and irretrievable--like--
What am I writing?--What am I daring to write?
*****
_Physician, heal thyself._ And surely that is one of a physician's first
duties. A disease struck inwards--the merest tyro knows how fatal is
treatment which results in that. It may be I have gone on the wrong
track altogether,--at least since my return to England.
The present only is a man's possession: the past is gone out of his
hand,--wholly, irrevocably. He may suffer from it, learn from it--in
degree, perhaps, expiate it; but to brood over it is utter madness.
Now, I have had many cases of insanity--both physical and moral, so
to speak; I call moral insanity that kind of disease which is
super-induced on comparatively healthy minds by dwelling incessantly on
one idea; the sort of disease which you find in women who have fallen
into melancholy from love-disappointments; or in men for overweening
ambition, hatred, or egotism--which latter, carried to a high pitch,
invariably becomes a kind of insanity. All these forms of monomania,
as distinguished from physical mania, disease of the structure of the
brain, I have studied with considerable interest and corresponding
success. My secret was simple enough; one which Nature herself often
tries and rarely fails in--the law of substitution; the slow eradication
of any fixed idea, by supplying others, under the influence of which the
original idea is, at all events temporarily, laid to sleep.
Why cannot I try this plan? why not do for myself what I have so many
times prescribed and done for others?
It was with some notion of the kind that I went to this ball--after
getting up a vague sort of curiosity in Treherne's anonymous beauty,
about whom he has so long been raving to me--boy-like. Ay, with all his
folly, the lad is an honest lad. I should not like him to come to any
harm.
The tall one must have been the lady, and the smaller, the plainer,
though the pleasanter to my mind, was no doubt her sister. And of course
her name too was _Johnson_.
What a name to startle a man so--to cause him to stand like a fool at
that hall-door, with his heart dead still, and all his nerves quivering!
To make him now, in the mere writing of it, pause and compel himself
into common sense by rational argument--by meeting the thing, be it
chimerical or not, face to face, as a man ought to do. Yet as cowardly,
in as base a paroxysm of terror, as if likewise face to face, in my hut
corner, stood--
Here I stopped. Shortly afterwards I was summoned to the hospital, where
I have been ever since. William Carter is dead. He will not want his
mother now. What a small matter life or death seems when one comes to
think of it. What an easy exchange!
Is it I who am writing thus, and on the same leaf which, closed up
in haste when I was fetched to the hospital, I have just had such an
anxious search for, that it might be instantly burnt. Yet, I find there
is nothing in it that I need have feared--nothing that could, in any
way, have signified to anybody, unless, perhaps, the writing of that one
name.
Shall I never get over this absurd folly--this absolute monomania?--when
there are hundreds of the same name to be met with every day--when,
after all, it is not exactly _the_ name!
Yet this is what it cost me. Let me write it down, that the confession
in plain English of such utter insanity may in degree have the same
effect as when I have sat down and desired a patient to recount to me,
one by one, each and all of his delusions, in order that, in the mere
telling of them, they might perhaps vanish.
I went away from that hall-door at once. Never asking--nor do I think
for my life I could ask, the simple question that would have set all
doubt at rest. I walked across country, up and down, along road or
woodland, I hardly knew whither, for miles--following the moon-rise. She
seemed to rise just as she did nineteen years ago--nineteen years, ten
months, all but two days--my arithmetic is correct, no fear! She lifted
herself like a ghost over those long level waves of moor, till she sat,
blood-red, upon the horizon, with a stare which there was nothing to
break, nothing to hide from--nothing between her and me, but the plain
and the sky--just as it was that night.
What am I writing? Is the old horror coming back again. It cannot. It
_must_ be kept at bay..
A knock--ah, I see; it is the sergeant of poor Carter's company. I must
return to daily work, and labour is life--to me.