Kitabı oku: «St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student», sayfa 15

CHAPTER XXXV.
THE HOBBY OF DR. SONES

Let me be sick myself if sometimes the malady of my patient be not a disease to me. I desire rather to cure his infirmities than my own necessities.

– Sir Thomas Browne.

 
We own that numbers join with care and skill,
A temperate judgment, a devoted will;
Men who suppress their feelings, but who feel
The painful symptoms they delight to heal.
 

– Crabbe.

As Mr. Crowe had evidently been for many months engaged in this particular branch of research, it occurred to his assistant that it would be a good idea to take up the same line himself. He was piqued that any new discoveries should be kept from him; and as he had devoted himself heartily to the interests of his chief, he felt he should have been permitted to share in so interesting a study as this promised to be. He had done much valuable microscopical work for the school and the curator of the museum, and here was an opportunity of still further glory. He got his firm of translators to write him an order to the Russian agents for the drugs and the fungi from which they were manufactured, and had the journals and books which recorded Professor Oppenheim’s discoveries sent to his private address. He went further than this. He had often rendered services to one Dr. Newberry Sones, an analyst and specialist in toxicology, who lived in a turning out of Wardour Street, and he determined to enlist him as a partner in the chemical part of his work.

Dr. Sones was not in any way connected with St. Bernard’s, nor did he even know Mr. Crowe, except by repute.

Dr. Sones was the parish surgeon of his district, and had a large and lucrative practice amongst the poor folk of his neighbourhood. He was an energetic man, and got through an amount of work in the course of his long day which amazed less active men. He had a hobby as every one has who is good for anything, more especially every medical man. If he has none, his mind becomes unhealthy from the nature of his calling. This hobby was analytical chemistry. When his day’s work was done he retired with a sigh of relief to his well-ordered laboratory at the top of his house, where he could carry on his experiments without fear of interruption. Much good work had been done in this place, for its owner was no amateur. He had written papers for half the chemical journals of Europe, and had earned an honourable name for the accuracy and utility of his research. He always declined work of a medico-legal nature, as he detested law and police courts, which would have interfered with his pursuits, in which he was perfectly happy; and, as he knew that change of work was as good as play, he never repined when a sick call took him from an interesting bit of research to help some poor sufferer. As he grew in prosperity he could afford to keep a qualified assistant, who did his night work for him; there being one thing in life which he dreaded – the sound of the night-bell. He loved his well-earned sleep, and thought it only fair that he should be able to count upon enjoying a good night’s repose if he did an honest day’s work. The room where the speaking-tube and night-bell communicated with the outer world was occupied by a gentleman who had no objection whatever to being called up, and seemed as happy tramping about at night as his employer was miserable at the bare idea of the proceeding. Every man to his taste. It is lucky for folk who are taken ill at ungodly hours that some body can be found to attend with cheerfulness and promptitude at, say, three a.m., when the snow is falling in January, or it is raining cats and dogs; or a genuine pea-soup fog makes the red lamp scarcely visible over the doctor’s door. The poorer the neighbourhood the more these night calls are the rule, because the indigent are often compelled to defer calling in medical aid till the most urgent necessity arises. In addition to this reason, they are more nervous, as they are usually unskilled nurses, and symptoms not really serious often cause the greatest alarm to ignorant persons.

Dr. Sones was beloved by his pauper patients, who knew how to secure his influence with the relieving officer when they wanted “nourishments,” which the doctor knew well were generally more efficient in effecting a cure of their little ailments than the physic he prescribed. His genial way with the poor creatures, his pleasant smile and his hopeful, cheering words were not the least effective armamentaria he bore with him in the treatment of disease. Crabbe’s well-known and admirable description of the consequential parish apothecary, “whose most tender mercy is neglect,” did not apply to Doctor Sones, who was as beloved by his poor clients as he was skilled in aiding them. He had the virtues which the poor always appreciate – sympathy and patience. No tale of impossible affections of disturbed organs in impossible situations ever caused him to speak irritably or hastily, so they poured out their troubles into his willing ears, and were always satisfied with his courtesy, if not relieved by his skill.

Of course, Sones entered with delight into the scheme as unfolded by Mr. Mole. He dearly loved a new line of research; but as he refused to have anything to do with the physiological part of the business, ridiculing the idea as unscientific that the alkaloids to be found would act in the same manner on animals as humans, Mr. Mole had to content himself with getting his chemical work done in the best way possible. And this was really all he wanted. The task was not an easy one, but Sones was just the man for it. When a matter like this took his fancy, he threw his whole soul into the work. He isolated a number of active principles from the hundreds of poisonous fungi which Mr. Mole brought to him, and put them into separate glass tubes, carefully marked with signs corresponding to those which he kept in a register. Mr. Mole was so interested in his pursuit that he actually tested some of these dreadful agents upon himself, after he had tried them on some dogs which had been reserved for the purpose.

Apart from the business he had with the analyst, Mr. Mole always enjoyed his visits to Wardour Street. Those who had once met Newberry Sones and his witty, clever sister Mary, in that hospitable home of theirs in Mulberry Lane, were always glad to go again; and so in the course of a few years they had gathered round them a society of charming people, in whose company the hours flew pleasantly by with high talk of poetry, literature, and with the refining influences of art and music. Mr. Mole found plenty of food for discussion and investigation in the mushroom question, and Sones had worked at little else of late than the isolation of the alkaloids in fungi. His laboratory had long been stocked with baskets full of agarics, morels, and puff-balls; every known poisonous species which collectors could bring in was rigidly submitted to analysis. Especial attention was directed by Mr. Mole to the species which are commonly eaten in Prussia and Russia, but which are never eaten in France, and to those which, though eaten with impunity in France, are considered poisonous in England. The great questions they desired to settle were the circumstances that modify the action of fungi, e. g. cooking, idiosyncrasy, climate, weather, and seasons; all of which are known very greatly to influence the behaviour of mushrooms in the human stomach.

Dr. Sones had nothing to do with the physiological part of the question, and Mr. Mole was dependent mainly for the chemical side of the business on Sones. When Mr. Crowe started on his annual holiday, the various poisonous alkaloids in the fungi had just been isolated by our chemist, and it only awaited a series of experiments on animals to verify the facts which had been discussed relative to their operation. During his absence Dr. Sones had prepared a considerable quantity of these deadly poisons for the use of his friend. The porter at St. Bernard’s had collected a sufficient number of animals of various ages and sizes for Mr. Mole, so that nothing was wanting but the remaining links in the chain of proof to settle once and for all the great question of the causes of mushroom poisoning. One terrible fact greatly impressed Dr. Sones as the result of these determinations: namely, that if the poisonous alkaloid became readily procurable, nothing would be easier than for a criminal to prepare a dish in such a manner that the eater thereof would die, without much chance of detection, owing to the bad reputation of the fungi for terminating life suddenly. He laboured, therefore, long and anxiously to find some reagent or means of detecting the presence of the different alkaloids he had discovered which were capable of causing death in the human species; but hitherto without success.

Dr. Sones had bought his practice of an aged surgeon who had occupied the house over fifty years. He often showed his friends a curious collection of old drugs and medicines that were in actual use in pharmacy in the time of his predecessor. There was a bottle labelled “Moss off a dead man’s skull,” but it was not known how or for what complaint it was administered. There was another horrible mess called “Oil of earth-worms,” besides “Oil of bricks,” and “Powdered tapeworms,” actually administered for those parasites on the similia similibus principle. “Cobwebs,” “Crabs’ eyes,” and “Crabs’ claws,” were at that time regularly used in medicine, the two latter being merely chalk, sold under those names. If one were disposed to laugh at the therapeutic folly of the past generation of doctors, Sones would remind you that quite as absurd and disgusting things have been “strongly recommended by the faculty” in the present day. A prominent medical journal only recently had several articles on the virtues of an “Essence of Cockroaches” of all loathsome remedies! What is there that has not at one time been either a deity or a drug? One of these old bottles contained a preparation from some Russian fungi, which he had not hitherto noticed, and in that he found an important clue to his tests.

CHAPTER XXXVI.
MR. CROWE AT GRANADA

 
He that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts,
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun,
Himself is his own dungeon.
 

– Milton.

 
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
 

– Wordsworth.

One lovely autumn evening, just five years after Elsworth went to Spain, two Englishmen were chatting over their wine in the dining-room of the Hotel de los Siete Suelos in the grounds of the Alhambra at Granada, under the red towers of that fairy palace of the Moors. The elder was an exceedingly handsome man of fifty or thereabouts, of commanding presence, a fine, open, honest, intelligent countenance, a voice all suavity and of soothing modulation and persuasive power, he looked every inch the sort of person he was – a fashionable West-End physician, whose clientèle was mostly composed of ladies.

Dr. Garnett Graves, lecturer on gynæcology at St. Bernard’s Hospital, was taking his holiday in Spain this year. His companion was his colleague at the same place – Mr. Malthus Crowe. They were taking their long vacation trip together, and had remained a few days longer at Granada than they had originally intended, because news had reached them that two ladies of their acquaintance were on their way home to England and would take Granada en route. It was of these ladies, expected to arrive by the evening train from Malaga, that these gentlemen were speaking. The talk was of money, and the prospects of the heiress.

Mr. Crowe we know; his companion needs some introduction. He was not a very scientific man, but withal a most successful physician. He managed somehow to do his patients a great deal of good, yet as he did not always know exactly why, some of his colleagues did not see the benefit of it, though the patients certainly did not offer any objection to the cure on this account. His colleagues did not exactly go the length of saying that the patients ought to have refused to be cured on such unscientific conditions; for as their contempt for the mental powers of patients in general was immeasurable, they probably thought them capable of any unscientific meanness. So Dr. Graves was not very popular with the younger and ultra-scientific members of St. Bernard’s staff, though his out-patient waiting-rooms were always crowded with suffering human beings, whose gratitude for his kindly, and generally efficient, help was unbounded. The students liked him and valued his teaching – that is, the younger ones did; but when they had been long enough at the hospital, they, too, came to see that a cure on unscientific grounds and upon doubtful principles was no cure at all; so they pitied his ignorance and turned elsewhere for knowledge.

Mr. Crowe would not have been out of his suitable environment in this very city of Granada had he happened to have been born in Isabella the Catholic’s time. Perhaps he would have made, in some respects, an excellent Inquisitor. Certainly he would have done well for one of the doctors who had to stand in the torture-room to say exactly how much more pain the victim could bear. The days of the Inquisition being run out, Mr. Crowe, as we said, would have been a square man in a round hole if the science of physiology had not demanded an expositor.

They were talking, these two doctors, at the Alhambra Hotel, about the only daughter and the orphan child of the great Sir Martin Lee, late consulting physician to St. Bernard’s, who had amassed enormous wealth by the practice of his profession, and recently dying, had left no less a sum than two hundred and fifty thousand pounds to his daughter, beside great legacies to friends and public institutions, amongst which St. Bernard’s came in for its share.

Known to both of the speakers of course was Mildred Lee, who, with her aunt, was expected that night to arrive in Granada, and would then with the two doctors continue the journey homewards.

Mr. Crowe had been a constant visitor at her father’s house, for Sir Martin had great sympathy with his physiological tastes; and though certainly not an original investigator himself, having a more profitable occupation as a fashionable physician, he found it very useful, and even necessary, to keep well ahead with all the research of the day, and to have the reputation for the highest scientific method. When he cured people, he always knew exactly the reason why; but he cured the patient first, and found the reason afterwards. At least, he always maintained that he did this, and never omitted to give the happy patient a popular little lecture on the subject, which sent him, or her, away not only disburdened of the ailment, but conscious of the delightful reflection that his case was an interesting contribution to clinical medicine and its cure the outcome of the study of practical physiology. For a great deal of this Sir Martin Lee sucked the brains of Mr. Crowe, who in his turn found his profit in the transaction, as he, being a surgeon, was often recommended by his more celebrated friend where the patient’s case was not a medical one. Dr. Graves, not being so ardent a devotee of science, and finding no such necessity for assuming a virtue he did not possess, had seldom visited the house in question. A great hospital, with its large medical school, its staff of professors, its physicians, surgeons, assistant physicians and assistant surgeons, its nursing sisters, nurses, dressers, and students, makes up a world in itself, of which the interests, occupations, and pursuits seem to those engaged in it to be almost the only ones of any consequence to them. They must feel this absorbing interest in all that belongs to it, or they would not be fit for their work, and could not continue it efficiently. The study of medicine demands, perhaps, a more complete sacrifice of the whole man than any other profession, except that of the Christian priesthood. To be a competent doctor at all, one must feel an overwhelming interest in the mysteries of health and disease. To be a distinguished doctor the interest must become a lifelong passion; and this, alas! too often closes in the mind of its possessor against the access of any other of the enthusiasms that lay hold of men.

Neither the Church nor the Bar demands so much of its disciples as does Medicine. They allow far more scope for the pursuit of letters than the healing art. We expect a clergyman or a barrister to be a literary man. We are surprised if the doctor, by stealing some hours from his daily avocations, attains even moderate eminence in the path of literature.

“A quarter of a million!” exclaimed Mr. Crowe, as he carved another slice of melon.

“Rather more than less,” said Dr. Graves.

“What will she do with it?”

“Ah! that is just what all the world is wondering!”

“She’ll be a fine catch for somebody!”

“I doubt it. She is not likely to be caught with any of the ordinary baits with which men fish for heiresses. She has a fine brain and ideas of her own which she will be likely to carry out, I fancy, before she is much older – expensive ideas, too, that may melt her fortune like snow before the sun.”

“Oh! but she is not extravagant?”

“No, because she has never yet discovered anything worth spending money upon. Ideas, notions, crazes, run away with a good deal more money than can be spent in Bond Street or the Palais Royal, you know.”

“But she does not want to convert the dwellers on the Congo to Paris fashions and Society journalism?”

“No; but you will find, unless somebody marries her, that she will spend the money on some mad humanitarian scheme quite as ridiculous.”

It was a little remarkable, perhaps, that these gentlemen, who owed their position to the great medical charity which absorbed their daily interests, should object to money being devoted to philanthropic purposes. Probably they had left their benevolent feelings in London when they donned their unprofessional travelling suits, and started for a two-months’ Iberian trip, and put themselves under the influences of history, poetry and romance. It would have taken a great deal of either to have warmed or softened the heart of Mr. Crowe; but Dr. Graves fell speedily under their domination, and became almost a devotee in some of the more magnificent of the historic cathedrals of the peninsula.

On this night, seated at the table, and discussing the wealth and position of his accomplished young friend, the thought crossed Mr. Crowe’s mind, “Were I but free, I should not despair of winning Mildred Lee and her wealth!”

These are dangerous thoughts to enter any man’s mind who has a troublesome wife, especially when that man has no other consideration than for himself alone. He wandered out of the Alhambra grounds and strolled along the road, over the hill, past the massive old red towers which had seen so many tragedies and had heard so often the din of battle for their mastery. He was not romantic, but had read deeply in Spanish history, and knew something of the world which had once been enclosed by those mouldering walls and fortresses. The soothing melody of falling waters and the whispering of the many streams which descend through the richly-wooded slopes to fall into the Genil, down to Granada, make a night under the shadow of the Alhambra a never-to-be-forgotten pleasure, like no other for kindling poetical thoughts and romantic ideas. But not poetry nor romance stirred, this autumn night, the breast of Mr. Crowe. The greed of gold, the thought of all he could achieve if he had the tenth of this woman’s wealth, was moving within him, and he went out to meditate on the matter. Past the gardens of the Generalife, up the hill, through vineyards and fields of prickly pear, by the cactus hedges and the clumps of aloes, under the soft shade of olive groves, on towards the Sierra Nevada, which lifts its sunny peaks to heaven like thrones of pearl above the Alhambra hill, till he found the road stopped by the cemetery wall. Seeking the entrance, he found himself for the first time within a Spanish place of burial. How unlike the quiet solemnity of an English churchyard! The ground was rough and untended; a few aloes were scattered here and there, but with no attempt at orderly arrangement. And where were the graves? In place of the sacred six feet of earth, planted with flowers and marked by beautiful sculpture, inscribed with the touching memorials of the dead, he saw innumerable cells, built in the thickness of the massive walls which surrounded the place, each cell hermetically sealed with a marble tablet, on which were recorded the name and titles of the departed whose remains it inclosed, together with some verses, or quotations from the Missal, in memory of the lost ones. An unpleasant, business-like way of economising space, far too suggestive of lockers in a store, and giving one a sense of insecurity against violation when the space occupied by the corpse should be required for a fresh tenant. As Mr. Crowe was an advocate of cremation, and considered land which would grow potatoes far too valuable to waste on dead people, his susceptibilities were exercised merely by the novelty of the arrangements, and not in any way by a sense of their impropriety. Any way, he considered them good enough for Spaniards, who were far too conservative to have any claim on an advanced thinker like himself.

Running his eye over the long rows of marble tablets which served to seal the openings of the cells which held the coffins, he was struck by the fact that two departed wives of doctors of medicine were amongst those deposited in the west wall. Nothing extraordinary in this – nothing to excite the least remark for most observers; but in Mr. Crowe’s present condition it set him wondering how much longer it would be ere he would be relieved of the now almost intolerable burden of a sick wife. Who stood a better chance with Mildred Lee than he, the old friend of the heiress’s father, himself her tutor? Admired by her for his science he knew he was – why not admired for himself, perhaps, if only free? He had never really loved his wife; he had married her for her fortune, and had been disappointed in its amount. He was not capable of loving anything but wealth and fame. He ardently longed to make some discovery which should bring him prominently before the medical world. To upset the theory of the last German or Frenchman whose work made any noise in the literature of the day, and to establish on the ruins of his reputation a better and more consistent one of his own: this was worth his days and nights of anxious thought, and his toilsome and patient investigation.

So morbid had he become that he looked upon all mankind from a pathological point of view, and it was seldom that he could not detect abnormal processes at work in those with whom he came in contact. His work absorbed him; and when he desired to hold converse with any one, it was on those topics connected with it alone. Possessed of a small patrimony, worth to him some £250 a year, he was compelled to add to his income by taking pupils to “coach” for the higher professional examinations. In this work he was very successful, for he was a painstaking and impressive teacher. He was withal a skilful surgeon, and had made many wonderful cures. He had rooms in a well-known street of doctors, but was consulted with extreme infrequency. His appointment as surgeon to St. Bernard’s did him little good in a pecuniary sense, for no patient liked him; and no man or maid-servant whose health had been restored under his care ever took the least pains to get master or mistress to call him to any case of sickness. Nobody ever thanked him for a cure; nobody ever gave him credit for curing him. A great many poor hospital patients gave him the credit for anything that went wrong with them while under his treatment; but their blame or their praise was equally a matter of indifference to him, who occupied himself only, as he said, with Man in general, especially man in the future, to the utter disregard of the man particular and the man present.

How often man with the big M has robbed and murdered the body and soul of the individual of the race! Was he happy? He had no idea of the meaning of the word; enough for him that complete mental occupation stifled and subdued the rising thoughts ever struggling in his heart to torment him.

* * * * *

He turned to leave the cemetery. The sun was sinking behind the distant mountains that bounded the western Vega. Amid scenes not to be surpassed for grandeur and beauty on this planet of ours, his thoughts were selfish and mean, and untinged by one ray of the romance or poetry which the surroundings should have imparted to the least cultured mind. He, the distinguished man of science, whose name was known in every physiological laboratory of Europe, beheld all this glory unthrilled by emotion, and scarcely troubled to think, except of the purely physical causes of what he knew were to others sources of the profoundest and most entrancing sentiment. It can be killed – the love of goodness! It can be stifled, suppressed, and destroyed – the heart’s throb of delight at loveliness and grandeur which awakens the emotions of even the untutored savage! And it can be stifled, suppressed, and killed by no surer method than that of coldly formulating, analysing, and materializing, till the sentiments of wonder and worship are dissipated into their elements. To-day, as he turned to leave the cemetery, he thought of his visit, when a boy, to a little churchyard on Bantry Bay, where straying once on a walking tour, he shed tears of joy at first beholding such a wealth of loveliness as met his eyes when they took in the glorious vision.

“I was a little fool then,” he thought.

Behind him was the pearl-crowned range of Nevada; around him were the richest tropical forms of flowers and fruit; below, the towers of the Alhambra, whose every stone was moss-grown with legend and cemented with story. Still below, the grand old city, fragrant with the odour of knightly deeds; and far beyond, stretching into illimitable distance, the lovely Vega, dying away into the vapoury west, behind whose mountain cincture was sinking the sun in a glorious wealth of colour and a momentarily varying richness of shade unimaginable to those who have not watched it set from that same spot where he stood. And he thought but of the spectrum, of Frauenhofer’s lines, of refraction and the absorption of light. His curse was on him, and fructifying. To lose the sense of feeling another’s pain is, in its culmination, to lose the sense of ever feeling pleasure one’s self. As the poet says, —

 
“Put pain from out the world, what room were left
For thanks to God, for love to man?”
 

Nature, ever striving to reduce the mountain to the level of the plain by its disintegrating and destructive processes, does but bring earth to earth; while man, repressing his holiest and most exalted emotions to the level of mere physiological processes, reduces spirit to earth. Mr. Crowe had perfectly succeeded. He went to his hotel. The nightingales in Wellington’s elms were singing – not for him; the streams were answering the constant whisper of the leaves – to him it was nothing but gravitation. The fire-flies danced and the moon shed her silver light over all this beauty. Bah! it was easily done in a laboratory! The whole universe was but an expansion of that. To bed, therefore, to rest, and to dream of something grander than scenery, poetry, or romance – money whereby to win a wider, a more enduring, and a more brilliant fame!

Mr. Crowe flattered himself that were he free to ask Mildred to become his wife, he would stand a good chance of being accepted. His long and close connection with her father, his acquaintance, not to say intimate friendship, with herself, the many opportunities time had afforded him of winning her esteem, his growing fame, the respect the world was beginning to show for his achievements in science, – all led him to hope that, were he but disencumbered, he might win the heiress.

Yet, at the rate his wife was sinking, she might last for many months. What was the good of her life to her? Would it not be merciful to terminate such an existence? When it became misery to live, why continue to do so?

Of course he maintained the right we all had to commit suicide. Might not such a man as himself, who had pushed many a poor wretch into Charon’s boat, scientifically hasten her removal?