My first interview with Dr. James Winter was under dramatic
circumstances. It occurred at two in the morning in the bedroom of an
old country house. I kicked him twice on the white waistcoat and
knocked off his gold spectacles, while he with the aid of a female
accomplice stifled my angry cries in a flannel petticoat and thrust me
into a warm bath. I am told that one of my parents, who happened to be
present, remarked in a whisper that there was nothing the matter with
my lungs. I cannot recall how Dr. Winter looked at the time, for I had
other things to think of, but his description of my own appearance is
far from flattering. A fluffy head, a body like a trussed goose, very
bandy legs, and feet with the soles turned inwards--those are the main
items which he can remember.
From this time onwards the epochs of my life were the periodical
assaults which Dr. Winter made upon me. He vaccinated me; he cut me
for an abscess; he blistered me for mumps. It was a world of peace and
he the one dark cloud that threatened. But at last there came a time
of real illness--a time when I lay for months together inside my
wickerwork-basket bed, and then it was that I learned that that hard
face could relax, that those country-made creaking boots could steal
very gently to a bedside, and that that rough voice could thin into a
whisper when it spoke to a sick child.
And now the child is himself a medical man, and yet Dr. Winter is the
same as ever. I can see no change since first I can remember him, save
that perhaps the brindled hair is a trifle whiter, and the huge
shoulders a little more bowed. He is a very tall man, though he loses
a couple of inches from his stoop. That big back of his has curved
itself over sick beds until it has set in that shape. His face is of a
walnut brown, and tells of long winter drives over bleak country roads,
with the wind and the rain in his teeth. It looks smooth at a little
distance, but as you approach him you see that it is shot with
innumerable fine wrinkles like a last year's apple. They are hardly to
be seen when he is in repose; but when he laughs his face breaks like a
starred glass, and you realise then that though he looks old, he must
be older than he looks.
How old that is I could never discover. I have often tried to find
out, and have struck his stream as high up as George IV and even the
Regency, but without ever getting quite to the source. His mind must
have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed
early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while
he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric.
He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and
expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he
was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and
his abandoning of the Corn Laws. The death of that statesman brought
the history of England to a definite close, and Dr. Winter refers to
everything which had happened since then as to an insignificant
anticlimax.
But it was only when I had myself become a medical man that I was able
to appreciate how entirely he is a survival of a past generation. He
had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by
which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study
of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave. His views
upon his own profession are even more reactionary than in politics.
Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less.
Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think
he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would practise
freely but for public opinion. Chloroform he regards as a dangerous
innovation, and he always clicks with his tongue when it is mentioned.
He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer
to the stethoscope as "a new-fangled French toy." He carries one in
his hat out of deference to the expectations of his patients, but he is
very hard of hearing, so that it makes little difference whether he
uses it or not.
He reads, as a duty, his weekly medical paper, so that he has a general
idea as to the advance of modern science. He always persists in
looking upon it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The germ
theory of disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite
joke in the sick room was to say, "Shut the door or the germs will be
getting in." As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the
crowning joke of the century. "The children in the nursery and the
ancestors in the stable," he would cry, and laugh the tears out of his
eyes.
He is so very much behind the day that occasionally, as things move
round in their usual circle, he finds himself, to his bewilderment, in
the front of the fashion. Dietetic treatment, for example, had been
much in vogue in his youth, and he has more practical knowledge of it
than any one whom I have met. Massage, too, was familiar to him when
it was new to our generation. He had been trained also at a time when
instruments were in a rudimentary state, and when men learned to trust
more to their own fingers. He has a model surgical hand, muscular in
the palm, tapering in the fingers, "with an eye at the end of each." I
shall not easily forget how Dr. Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell,
the County Member, and were unable to find the stone. It was a
horrible moment. Both our careers were at stake. And then it was that
Dr. Winter, whom we had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced
into the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about
nine inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it. "It's
always well to bring one in your waistcoat-pocket," said he with a
chuckle, "but I suppose you youngsters are above all that."
We made him president of our branch of the British Medical Association,
but he resigned after the first meeting. "The young men are too much
for me," he said. "I don't understand what they are talking about."
Yet his patients do very well. He has the healing touch--that magnetic
thing which defies explanation or analysis, but which is a very evident
fact none the less. His mere presence leaves the patient with more
hopefulness and vitality. The sight of disease affects him as dust
does a careful housewife. It makes him angry and impatient. "Tut,
tut, this will never do!" he cries, as he takes over a new case. He
would shoo Death out of the room as though he were an intrusive hen.
But when the intruder refuses to be dislodged, when the blood moves
more slowly and the eyes grow dimmer, then it is that Dr. Winter is of
more avail than all the drugs in his surgery. Dying folk cling to his
hand as if the presence of his bulk and vigour gives them more courage
to face the change; and that kindly, windbeaten face has been the last
earthly impression which many a sufferer has carried into the unknown.
When Dr. Patterson and I--both of us young, energetic, and
up-to-date--settled in the district, we were most cordially received by
the old doctor, who would have been only too happy to be relieved of
some of his patients. The patients themselves, however, followed their
own inclinations--which is a reprehensible way that patients have--so
that we remained neglected, with our modern instruments and our latest
alkaloids, while he was serving out senna and calomel to all the
countryside. We both of us loved the old fellow, but at the same time,
in the privacy of our own intimate conversations, we could not help
commenting upon this deplorable lack of judgment. "It's all very well
for the poorer people," said Patterson. "But after all the educated
classes have a right to expect that their medical man will know the
difference between a mitral murmur and a bronchitic rale. It's the
judicial frame of mind, not the sympathetic, which is the essential
one."
I thoroughly agreed with Patterson in what he said. It happened,
however, that very shortly afterwards the epidemic of influenza broke
out, and we were all worked to death. One morning I met Patterson on
my round, and found him looking rather pale and fagged out. He made
the same remark about me. I was, in fact, feeling far from well, and I
lay upon the sofa all the afternoon with a splitting headache and pains
in every joint. As evening closed in, I could no longer disguise the
fact that the scourge was upon me, and I felt that I should have
medical advice without delay. It was of Patterson, naturally, that I
thought, but somehow the idea of him had suddenly become repugnant to
me. I thought of his cold, critical attitude, of his endless
questions, of his tests and his tappings. I wanted something more
soothing--something more genial.
"Mrs. Hudson," said I to my housekeeper, "would you kindly run along to
old Dr. Winter and tell him that I should be obliged to him if he would
step round?"
She was back with an answer presently. "Dr. Winter will come round in
an hour or so, sir; but he has just been called in to attend Dr.
Patterson."