Battle
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.