They lie in long, bright wards, which are full of that clean hospital
smell of warmth, flowers, and drugs. A neat-waisted nurse moves
between the beds, smiling, bending, whispering, easing a pillow,
passing from weary smile to weary smile, so young by contrast with
these sufferers, so healthy, so calm, so reliable.
The women are mostly middle-aged, but their plaited hair, lying in
two little coils over their shoulders, gives them a youthful look, so
that you realize what they were like when they were eighteen. Some
are pale, their poor, thin arms the colour of unbleached wax; many
look so well that you marvel that they should be there. It is the
same in the men's wards. Cancer! That malignant, hissing word that
lurks like a spectre at the back of so many minds has brought these
men and women to one of the most noble hospitals in the world--the
Free Cancer Hospital in the Fulham Road.
I admit that when I entered my first ward I shrank, in the shameful
cowardice of my health, as I did once when a leper in the East rose
up on his stumps out of the dust and touched my arm. To see the
unimaginable horrors which you could be called on to suffer, to see
lying there before your eyes the unthinkable depths to which your
fine, strong body could sink, is a ghastly ordeal.
Yet what did I see? I saw greater than this black thing whose
vileness no words can mitigate, the splendid forces of Heroism and
Hope: Heroism in the long, quiet wards, Hope in the operating
theatres, in the laboratories. Here in the middle of London, with
streams of omnibuses thundering past beyond the railings, is a day
and night battle with agony. Tragedy and triumph follow each other
through these white halls, and over all is that fine spirit of
enthusiasm as of an army banded to fight for a cause.
* * *
Instead of shuddering at the flesh, I reverenced the spirit that
rises up and fights this unknown terror, fights it with the knife and
with the test tube and with the X-ray, and goes on fighting, goes on
hoping. Have you ever in a storm at sea thrilled to the driving,
thrusting strength and balance of a great ship riding the tempest?
If so, you will know how I felt in this hospital that steers its
course through an ocean of suffering.
"This is the laboratory!"
A man in white overalls was bending over a microscope. Another man
in white was examining the changing colour in a test tube. The rigid
set of their shoulders denoted utter concentration. Round them lay
hundreds of glass globes, bottles, ghastly exhibits from which I
swiftly turned away.
Day in and day out, year after year, the research department of this
hospital searches into the mysteries of cancer. In one part of the
building doctors try to cure or alleviate the disease; in another
scientists work with their minds on that day when it may be possible
to prevent it. Is there a more splendid room in London?
* * *
The chronic ward! Through glass doors I saw in one men, in another
women. They were away from the other patients in whom the disease
has been caught in time. I tried not to look at the seared faces; I
turned from the broken lives with a soreness at my heart. Some of
them have been there for years, some are there for life. Over many
of them was a strange, still peace which made me see, but I may be
wrong, a nurse hurrying down those calm corridors with a merciful
hypodermic syringe in her hand.
* * *
Visiting day! Can you imagine the quiet heroism of it? The wife who
comes to see the husband who has been taken away from her, the
husband who creeps in towards a bed in which, so small and girlish
and white, she lies waiting for him? The flowers, the little
cheerfulnesses, and, behind it all, the doubt, the wondering, the
ache, the sense of injustice.
"Well, you'll soon be well and home again, dear."
"Yes! And how's old Johnny? How I'd love to see that dog again!"
Then anxiously, swiftly in reply:
"But you will, you old silly, you _will_!"
"Yes, of course, perhaps I will."
"Good-bye!"
"Oh, come back, my dear. Just once more! How lovely your hair
smells...."
Can you imagine how often the most cheerful visitor crumples up when
the weary eyes from the bed cannot see beyond the closed door?
* * *
Who is Dr. William Marsden?
How many Londoners know? He was the man who seventy-one years ago
founded this hospital, and behind it lies a story as tragic as any in
its wards. When going home late one night Dr. Marsden, who was then
a young medical student, found a poor girl in a dying condition on a
doorstep near Holborn. He took her to a hospital, where she was
refused admission because she bore no letter of introduction from a
subscriber. The next day she died. The young medical student
resolved that if he succeeded in life he would found a free hospital
for which there would be no qualification for admission but poverty
and suffering.
He became famous, he loved, he married. Then his own wife was
stricken with cancer, and nothing could be done to check the disease.
Out of her death and the death of the unknown woman sprang this
splendid work that shines like a good deed over London.