THE SURGEON OF THE FLEET.
Cadwallader Cuticle, M. D., and Honorary Member of the most
distinguished Colleges of Surgeons both in Europe and America, was our
Surgeon of the Fleet. Nor was he at all blind to the dignity of his
position; to which, indeed, he was rendered peculiarly competent, if
the reputation he enjoyed was deserved. He had the name of being the
foremost Surgeon in the Navy, a gentleman of remarkable science, and a
veteran practitioner.
He was a small, withered man, nearly, perhaps quite, sixty years of
age. His chest was shallow, his shoulders bent, his pantaloons hung
round skeleton legs, and his face was singularly attenuated. In truth,
the corporeal vitality of this man seemed, in a good degree, to have
died out of him. He walked abroad, a curious patch-work of life and
death, with a wig, one glass eye, and a set of false teeth, while his
voice was husky and thick; but his mind seemed undebilitated as in
youth; it shone out of his remaining eye with basilisk brilliancy.
Like most old physicians and surgeons who have seen much service, and
have been promoted to high professional place for their scientific
attainments, this Cuticle was an enthusiast in his calling. In private,
he had once been heard to say, confidentially, that he would rather cut
off a man’s arm than dismember the wing of the most delicate pheasant.
In particular, the department of Morbid Anatomy was his peculiar love;
and in his state-room below he had a most unsightly collection of
Parisian casts, in plaster and wax, representing all imaginable
malformations of the human members, both organic and induced by
disease. Chief among these was a cast, often to be met with in the
Anatomical Museums of Europe, and no doubt an unexaggerated copy of a
genuine original; it was the head of an elderly woman, with an aspect
singularly gentle and meek, but at the same time wonderfully expressive
of a gnawing sorrow, never to be relieved. You would almost have
thought it the face of some abbess, for some unspeakable crime
voluntarily sequestered from human society, and leading a life of
agonised penitence without hope; so marvellously sad and tearfully
pitiable was this head. But when you first beheld it, no such emotions
ever crossed your mind. All your eyes and all your horrified soul were
fast fascinated and frozen by the sight of a hideous, crumpled horn,
like that of a ram, downward growing out from the forehead, and partly
shadowing the face; but as you gazed, the freezing fascination of its
horribleness gradually waned, and then your whole heart burst with
sorrow, as you contemplated those aged features, ashy pale and wan. The
horn seemed the mark of a curse for some mysterious sin, conceived and
committed before the spirit had entered the flesh. Yet that sin seemed
something imposed, and not voluntarily sought; some sin growing out of
the heartless necessities of the predestination of things; some sin
under which the sinner sank in sinless woe.
But no pang of pain, not the slightest touch of concern, ever crossed
the bosom of Cuticle when he looked on this cast. It was immovably
fixed to a bracket, against the partition of his state-room, so that it
was the first object that greeted his eyes when he opened them from his
nightly sleep. Nor was it to hide the face, that upon retiring, he
always hung his Navy cap upon the upward curling extremity of the horn,
for that obscured it but little.
The Surgeon’s cot-boy, the lad who made up his swinging bed and took
care of his room, often told us of the horror he sometimes felt when he
would find himself alone in his master’s retreat. At times he was
seized with the idea that Cuticle was a preternatural being; and once
entering his room in the middle watch of the night, he started at
finding it enveloped in a thick, bluish vapour, and stifling with the
odours of brimstone. Upon hearing a low groan from the smoke, with a
wild cry he darted from the place, and, rousing the occupants of the
neighbouring state-rooms, it was found that the vapour proceeded from
smouldering bunches of lucifer matches, which had become ignited
through the carelessness of the Surgeon. Cuticle, almost dead, was
dragged from the suffocating atmosphere, and it was several days ere he
completely recovered from its effects. This accident took place
immediately over the powder magazine; but as Cuticle, during his
sickness, paid dearly enough for transgressing the laws prohibiting
combustibles in the gun-room, the Captain contented himself with
privately remonstrating with him.
Well knowing the enthusiasm of the Surgeon for all specimens of morbid
anatomy, some of the ward-room officers used to play upon his
credulity, though, in every case, Cuticle was not long in discovering
their deceptions. Once, when they had some sago pudding for dinner, and
Cuticle chanced to be ashore, they made up a neat parcel of this
bluish-white, firm, jelly-like preparation, and placing it in a tin
box, carefully sealed with wax, they deposited it on the gun-room
table, with a note, purporting to come from an eminent physician in
Rio, connected with the Grand National Museum on the Praca d’
Acclamacao, begging leave to present the scientific Senhor Cuticle—with
the donor’s compliments—an uncommonly fine specimen of a cancer.
Descending to the ward-room, Cuticle spied the note, and no sooner read
it, than, clutching the case, he opened it, and exclaimed, “Beautiful!
splendid! I have never seen a finer specimen of this most interesting
disease.”
“What have you there, Surgeon Cuticle?” said a Lieutenant, advancing.
“Why, sir, look at it; did you ever see anything more exquisite?”
“Very exquisite indeed; let me have a bit of it, will you, Cuticle?”
“Let you have a bit of it!” shrieked the Surgeon, starting back. “Let
you have one of my limbs! I wouldn’t mar so large a specimen for a
hundred dollars; but what can you want of it? You are not making
collections!”
“I’m fond of the article,” said the Lieutenant; “it’s a fine cold
relish to bacon or ham. You know, I was in New Zealand last cruise,
Cuticle, and got into sad dissipation there among the cannibals; come,
let’s have a bit, if it’s only a mouthful.”
“Why, you infernal Feejee!” shouted Cuticle, eyeing the other with a
confounded expression; “you don’t really mean to eat a piece of this
cancer?”
“Hand it to me, and see whether I will not,” was the reply.
“In God’s name, take it!” cried the Surgeon, putting the case into his
hands, and then standing with his own uplifted.
“Steward!” cried the Lieutenant, “the castor—quick! I always use plenty
of pepper with this dish, Surgeon; it’s oystery. Ah! this is really
delicious,” he added, smacking his lips over a mouthful. “Try it now,
Surgeon, and you’ll never keep such a fine dish as this, lying uneaten
on your hands, as a mere scientific curiosity.”
Cuticle’s whole countenance changed; and, slowly walking up to the
table, he put his nose close to the tin case, then touched its contents
with his finger and tasted it. Enough. Buttoning up his coat, in all
the tremblings of an old man’s rage he burst from the ward-room, and,
calling for a boat, was not seen again for twenty-four hours.
But though, like all other mortals, Cuticle was subject at times to
these fits of passion—at least under outrageous provocation—nothing
could exceed his coolness when actually employed in his imminent
vocation. Surrounded by moans and shrieks, by features distorted with
anguish inflicted by himself, he yet maintained a countenance almost
supernaturally calm; and unless the intense interest of the operation
flushed his wan face with a momentary tinge of professional enthusiasm,
he toiled away, untouched by the keenest misery coming under a
fleet-surgeon’s eye. Indeed, long habituation to the dissecting-room
and the amputation-table had made him seemingly impervious to the
ordinary emotions of humanity. Yet you could not say that Cuticle was
essentially a cruel-hearted man. His apparent heartlessness must have
been of a purely scientific origin. It is not to be imagined even that
Cuticle would have harmed a fly, unless he could procure a microscope
powerful enough to assist him in experimenting on the minute vitals of
the creature.
But notwithstanding his marvellous indifference to the sufferings of
his patients, and spite even of his enthusiasm in his vocation—not
cooled by frosting old age itself—Cuticle, on some occasions, would
effect a certain disrelish of his profession, and declaim against the
necessity that forced a man of his humanity to perform a surgical
operation. Especially was it apt to be thus with him, when the case was
one of more than ordinary interest. In discussing it previous to
setting about it, he would veil his eagerness under an aspect of great
circumspection, curiously marred, however, by continual sallies of
unsuppressible impatience. But the knife once in his hand, the
compassionless surgeon himself, undisguised, stood before you. Such was
Cadwallader Cuticle, our Surgeon of the Fleet.