Walking side by side the dreamer and the practitioner went to the great Hospital.
“You cut that head off coldly and skillfully,” said the former. “Have you less emotion when dealing with the quick? Does suffering affect you less than insensibility? Are you more pitiless with living bodies than the dead?”
“No, for it would be a fault, as in an executioner to let himself feel anything. A man would die from being miscut in the limb as surely as though his head were struck off. A good surgeon ought to operate with his hand and not his heart, though he knows in his heart that he is going to give years of life and happiness for the second’s suffering. That is the golden lining to our profession.”
“Yes; but in the living, I hope you meet with the soul?”
“Yes, if you hold that the soul is the moving impulse—the sensitiveness; that I do meet, and it is very troublesome sometimes for it kills more patients than my scalpel.”
Guided by Marat, who would not put aside his ghastly burden, Balsamo was introduced into the operation ward, crowded with the chief surgeon and the students.
The aids brought in a young man, knocked down the previous week by a heavy wagon which had crushed his foot. A hasty operation at that time had not sufficed; mortification had spread and amputation of the leg was necessary. Stretched on the bed of anguish, the poor fellow looked with a terror which would have melted tigers, on the band of eager men who waited for the time of his martyrdom, his death perchance, to study the science of life—the marvellous phenomenon which conceals the gloomy one of death. He seemed to sue from the surgeon and assistants some smile of comfort, but he met indifference on all sides, steel in every eye.
A remnant of courage and manly pride kept him mute, reserving all to try to check the screams which agony would tear from him.
Still, when he felt the kindly heavy hand of the porter on his shoulder, and the aid's arms interlace him like serpents, and heard the operator’s voice saying “Keep up your pluck my brave man!” he ventured to break the stillness by asking in a plaintive tone:
“You are not going to hurt me much?”